About
My name is Stéphane Thomas. I am a Senior Engineer specialized in web applications, with more than 10 years of professional experience, and who works now as a consultant. I am also a young entrepreneur who loves to design and build Internet services and who is passionate about web development and new technologies.
I am now 33 years old and I live in the South of France, on the French Riviera (just next to the beautiful Sophia Antipolis technology park). Professionally speaking, my areas of expertise are J2EE and PHP web based applications. Being very curious and creative by nature, I am also interested in several other areas like software methodologies, web design, product definition...
Background
I created my first website in 1997 and have been working almost full-time in the Internet industry since 2000, the year I graduated in Computer Science from the Polytech Nice-Sophia Engineering School (previously known as ESSI). I then had the opportunity to work with big companies as well as startups spanning a wide range of business industries like travel distribution, global communication solutions, secure payment services and sports.
I’ve spent the majority of my career designing, developing and deploying J2EE applications and enjoying all the possibilities offered by Java, a very nice and powerful language. My responsibilities covered most of the time almost all the development lifecycle, ranging from writing functional specifications, modeling use cases and implementing business rules to integrating and qualifying new functionalities.
I have always been particularly attentive to the different ways to improve productivity and to leverage code quality with best practices or new technologies (e.g. effective use of team collaboration tools, version control, coding conventions ...). I developed a strong expertise with open source tools like Apache Ant, Eclipse or Subversion. Since a few years, I also have now a very good exposure to the LAMP stack and to frameworks like Zend Framework and Mootools.
Starting from 2006, I share my time between my clients and my projects, my main objective being to build a startup company. In case you are looking for more information about my professional experience (including some technical details), please do not hesitate to consult my resume. This page also features a nice timeline which will give you a pretty good overview of key dates in my working life.
Loomiz
Even if it is quite challenging (considering the existing competition), I decided to start my own venture in October 2006: Loomiz. It is a brand new social bookmarking service meant to be simple, elegant and addictive. This service will let people store addresses (i.e. bookmarks) of their favorite websites online so they can access them from anywhere.
Loomiz will also feature the possibility to organize addresses by keywords to find them more easily later on, as well as sharing them with his or her circle. It is not yet released, but I am still working hard at it. All my other professional activities are currently targeted at funding this new service which is entirely bootstrapped.
Simple Entrepreneur
Simple Entrepreneur is the name of the blog I opened up in September 2006 to talk about Loomiz and other related topics like entrepreneurship, web design and web development. Occasionally, I would showcase and review some new web 2.0 services. This blog got a lot of traction and has now a loyal reader base of more than 7,000 readers.
OpenCoffee Club Sophia
I initiated the OpenCoffee Club Sophia in August 2008 to allow people involved in startups and Internet to meet together. Since then, the organization team has grown and takes care of all the participants that gather every first and third Thursday of each month. Started in London and now around the world, OpenCoffee Clubs are regular, open and informal meeting places.
Consulting
As a freelance consultant since June 2008, I work with startups to help them getting started and building successful web applications. I mainly provide User Experience, Internet Strategy and Technology Consulting services. If you need someone who can improve your developement process or the way your users interact with your web application, maybe we should talk.
Hitomi Studio
Hitomi Studio is a small agency I cofounded in April 2009. It is specialized in the development of bespoke and effective ecommerce websites based on the open source solution Magento. Hitomi Studio helps its clients to plan, design, build and refine their electronic commerce presence on Internet, with a strong focus on usability and best practices.