Michel Billard

For the past year, up until July 2012, I have been learning Ruby on Rails at Code Génome. They were nice enough to trust that I would manage to get up and running with Ruby on Rails even with very little experience with the framework (I had done a tiny project, Survvit, just to see if I could get something running all by myself). During the year, I learned a lot about Rails and the vast differences between it and .Net. I switched from working on a Windows PC in a powerful IDE, to a MAC with Sublime Text (not an IDE, but still a powerful text-editor). I reunited with Unix after not having used it for quite a while. It’s a much better work environment than .Net ever was.

Come July 2012, I get contacted by two young entrepreneurs in search for a technical co-founder. At first I was a little skeptical, we’ve all heard of the stories of business people asking developers for the moon with very little incentive for the developer (it’s the next Facebook!). However, these two were different and had done their homework: they had a solid business plan, a project well defined and already quite advanced in terms of design and user experience. They also offered a satisfying compensation for my services as well as the opportunity to be one of the co-founders.

With a little less than a year of experience with Rails, I had my doubts at the beginning, especially since I had a good stable job. Was I ready to fly solo and have no safety net? I was already mostly autonomous, but it’s always reassuring to know that help is just a murmur away. Plus, I don’t really enjoy sysadmin stuff and that’s something that would have to be taken care of, no one else would be able to.

So I took the jump and am I glad I did. Developing a SAAS project is something I’ve always dreamed about and I’m quite happy with the amount of work I’ve managed to do up until now. Most of the sysadmin stuff is hidden to me because I decided to go with heroku, I managed to implement all the complicated stuff that scared me initially and I’m really enjoying programming again. Working for yourself is so different than doing stuff for a client.

So the development of CoachOasis is going well, we’re nearing the date for a private beta and we’re really excited to have people start using it and getting healthier with the tool we’re making for them.

Sorry for the pun, but I just had to.

So I haven’t posted in a while and now that my situation has stabilized, I finally feel that I can write it all down.

April 26: I announce my resignation to Hint Innovation

I had already been looking for a new job for a while, but none of the jobs were appealing to me. I was very picky for two reasons: I had excellent conditions at Hint and I’m a good developer which gives me access to many opportunities. A week before giving my resignation, a company I had never heard of contacted me through LinkedIn (through a recruiter). The conditions were fantastics, the pay great and I would have the opportunity to build and lead my own team of developers. When I received the offer, my job satisfaction at Hint was at all time low so the decision was quite easy. Read the rest of this entry »

It has now been a week since I left Hint Innovation and I’ve been thinking about what I accomplished there. As to not forget, I decided to write it down here.

• I was their first employee
• I initiated the move from CVS to Subversion (SVN)
• I initiated the move from SVN to Mercurial (Hg) (3 years later)
• I started the internal Wiki
• I helped integrate one intern and 3 full-time employees
• I worked on many internal libraries and tools still in use at the time of my departure
• I took a major role in the development of a dozen client projects often as the only front-end developer (while still working on the back-end and storage parts)
• I took part in countless design and architectural meetings and decisions
• I presented a project to a client’s client

Final thoughts

I’m happy with what I accomplished at Hint, I feel like I had a huge impact on how the company turned out. Hopefully, I can have the same impact at my new workplace.