Blog · Personal history
I grew up with the web.
I did not arrive online through a browser. I arrived through games, a CD-ROM full of tips and forums where changing a theme became a reason to learn code. For almost thirty years, I have followed the same orange cable.
Before I knew it was computing#
Before I knew what a network was, a screen could already open a world. The original Sonic the Hedgehog on Mega Drive brought speed and colour. The first Adibou on a computer introduced a different rhythm, one where playing and learning shared the same machine.
Tekken 3 on PlayStation and Jet Set Radio Future on the first Xbox followed. From one machine to the next, consoles and computer were already part of the same story. In retrospect, that was already the thread connecting games, learning and, soon, the web.
The web I could bring home#
The first web I recognised as a place was the ETAJV from Jeuxvideo.com. I went there for Pokémon and GTA guides, the kind of material I still had to buy if I wanted a copy to keep locally. ETAJV brought the web into that search.
That local copy mattered. A connection was not assumed, and information did not follow you everywhere. Then Prizee.com and OGame gave me reasons to return. The screen was no longer only a library or a game. There were other people on the other side.
Before feeds, there were forums#
Those sites led me to my first forums: ForumDesJoueurs.com, Kloobik.org and its community of designers, Titaxium, then Rentabilisez.com among webmasters. They felt like places, not feeds. The same names came back, discussions had a memory, and a newcomer could slowly become useful.
Through them, I discovered phpBB and created my first themes and plugins. Changing a visual detail made me read a template; adding a feature made me read the code. That was my first route from using the web to building for it.
A domain name on the way home#
In 2006, I was returning from a school trip to Italy when Nintendo announced that the Revolution would be called the Wii. I bought wii-fr.com on the way home and built a blog on it. Two months later, I sold the site for €2,000.
I was thirteen. The lesson was not that every domain name was worth €2,000. It was that something made on an ordinary computer could acquire real value outside it. I understood that it was possible to make a living from this world. I never really left it.
The sale did not give me a career at thirteen. It gave me proof that an idea, a domain and enough curiosity could become a product.
When PageRank had a price#
After wii-fr.com, I created dozens of sites and worked on their search ranking. At the time, a service placing casino advertisements could pay several hundred euros per month, with the amount linked to a site’s PageRank. Search visibility was not an abstract score. It had a price.
That economy was strange, opportunistic and very direct. I learned on the pages I put online: I built them, worked on their search ranking and watched their PageRank. At the time, the web was my learning ground.
Learning to lead in a country that did not exist#
At seventeen, I tried preparatory classes. They did not suit me, so I returned to my secondary school for a Higher Technician Certificate in Electronic Systems. At the same time, I discovered eRepublik, a game with a persistent political and military world.
In its virtual eFrance, I became a member of Congress, general of the armies, then president for several months. Those titles belonged to a game, but they already covered representation, command and decision-making. Long before I managed an engineering team, I had held all three roles in a virtual world.
From forums to electronics#
Electronics still fascinates me. The certificate led to an engineering degree at the École Nationale d’Ingénieurs de Brest, then to a double degree in Canada at the Université de Sherbrooke. The machines became systems. The forums became teams. The small sites became platforms and personal projects.
Swipe horizontally or use the arrow keys to follow the whole path.
The formal chronology is on my CV, and the things I build now live on the Projects page. The thread between them is less formal: play, search, join, build, take responsibility, then start again with a harder problem.