About
My name is Stéphane Thomas. I am a Senior Engineer specialized in web applications with over 11 years of professional experience. I am now 35 years old and I live in the South of France, on the French Riviera, just next to the beautiful Sophia Antipolis technology park. I have a real passion for new technologies, user experience and entrepreneurship.
Professionally speaking, my areas of expertise are J2EE and LAMP architectures. As such, I am proficient in client-server applications and have a strong understanding of object oriented programming as well as design patterns. Being very curious and creative by nature, I am also interested in several other areas like development methodologies, design, product definition ...
Since 2006, I am also engaged in several ventures, as an entrepreneur.
Technical 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 from the Polytech Nice-Sophia Engineering School (formerly known as ESSI) in Computer Science. I then had the opportunity to work with multinational companies as well as a startup spanning a wide range of business industries like travel distribution, global communication solutions, secure payment services and sports.
I've spent the major part of my career designing, developing and deploying J2EE applications. My responsibilities covered most of the time almost all the development life cycle, ranging from writing functional specifications, modeling use cases and implementing business rules to integrating and qualifying new functionalities.
I developed a strong expertise with open source tools and technologies like Apache Ant, Eclipse and Subversion.
I have always been particularly attentive to the different ways of improving productivity and leveraging code quality (e.g. effective use of team collaboration tools, version control, coding conventions ...). More generally, I am very interested in architectural issues and software development methodologies.
I also have now a strong exposure to the LAMP stack and to frameworks like Mootools and Zend Framework (starting from version 0.3), mainly because I started several ventures based on those open source technologies since five years.
As such, I was also naturally involved in the whole set of activities required to build and launch a web application: product definition, planning, software and technical architecture, information architecture, usability, visual design, frontend development, backend development, database design, server configuration, copywriting, search engine optimization, etc.
In case you are looking for more information about my professional experience (including some technical details), please do not hesitate to consult my resume.
Timeline
Here is a chronological overview of the key milestones in my working life (click to open):
Loomiz
Even if it was quite challenging (considering the existing competition), I decided to resign from my last job in October 2006 and to start my own venture: Loomiz. It was a new social bookmarking service meant to be simple, elegant and addictive. This service would let people store addresses of their favorite websites online so they can access them from anywhere.
Loomiz would 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. Loomiz was never released nor incorporated because of a lack of funding (it was entirely bootstrapped), but was definitively a great experience.
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 8,000 readers.
OpenCoffee Club Sophia
In August 2008, I created the OpenCoffee Club Sophia, an event that gathers twice a month entrepreneurs, developers and other people who love startups and who work in the Internet industry. 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 provide User Experience, Internet Strategy and Technology Consulting services to startups and Internet companies to help them build web applications. If you need someone with a creative technology mindset who can assist you from concept to launch, maybe we should talk.
Hitomi Studio
Hitomi Studio was a development studio I cofounded in April 2009 specialized in high-end ecommerce solutions for brands. We helped brands to expand their business on Internet and to increase their revenues by planning, designing and developing bespoke online stores based on Magento, a feature-rich ecommerce platform.
Gary Coupon
Gary Coupon is the last venture I bootstrapped. Launched in May 2010, this new search engine lists discounts, free shipping, special offers, gifts and best deals to let you save money when you buy on Internet. You can also define alerts to be notified automatically as soon as new coupons for your favorite stores are published.
