Hi! My name is Sylvain Wallez. I'm 40 and live in Toulouse
in the south of France. I started using Cocoon in July 2000 and since
then got more
and more involved in Apache's meritocratic
organization:
Here's a short bio for those who want to know who's hiding behind
sylvain@apache.org.
As said above, I'm 40 and live in Toulouse. I'm married and we
have two sons who are 16
and 11.
I've been playing with computers since the age of 15. My first computer
was an Apple IIe,
and I spent much more time "studying" game protections than actually
playing with them. I bought a Mac SE in 1987 and
spent three months reading the whole "Inside Macintosh" before
spawning my first window on screen. Using it for university projects
helped me a lot: the teachers liked to play with nice GUIs at a time
where PC users didn't even know what a mouse was! I studied computer
science at the UTC, specializing in artificial
intelligence.
I then worked during 10 years in the space industry, building
software systems for satellite monitoring and control. After having
used Ada, C and C++, we
switched to Java in 1998 and I became leader of a team devoted to
building reusable software components and promoting component
oriented design for space control systems. The last one that we've
build when I left the company was a distributed mission planning
system of about 300k lines of distributed Java code. Starting in 1995,
I also built the first intranet of the company, using the NCSA http
server.
During these 10 years, I always had official or unofficial side
projects to feed my insatiable desire to learn and experiment. I wrote
a C/C++/Ada code generator in Prolog (a MDA
tool when it wasn't invented), have been setting up the first intranet
in 1995 (with an issue tracker in CGI/shell, then an early version of
Zope), contributing a PDF indexer to htDig,
and generally was curious about everything. Long negociations (that's
how it is in BigCos) allowed me to have unrestricted internet access in
my office in 1997. Full access to the resources of the web combined
with the emergence of Java and all the open-source movement around it
was a mind-blowing experience, which made me realize that somehow my
job had been boring until then.
In July 2000, I co-founded Anyware
Technologies
with a few colleagues and friends
because we had enough of the heavy process of large companies and
wanted to have more fun with Java and web technologies. As the Chief
Technologist, I helped the company to grow up to 45 employees, doing
many interesting things with Cocoon, sometimes in unusual situations
like cars and automation devices. We started
with Cocoon 1 and quickly switched to a pre-alpha version of Cocoon
2. Then I was elected as a Cocoon committer in april 2001. That came as a real surprise, since although being a regular contributor I didn't thought I could be "one of them".
That was the beginning
of a long history, and over the years I became one of the core developers of Cocoon.
Open source is actually more about people than about software. I came
to know lots of interesting people, learn a lot from them, and help
others to learn. At the beginning of 2006, Dirk-Willem van Gulik (one
of the founders of Apache) proposed me to join an exciting super-secret
project with many other people from major open-source organizations
such as Apache and Mozilla. A new step in my progression in this world.
After working in stealth mode for 10 months, the project was revealed: The Venice Project,
television as it should have been. I work with my colleagues in
Toulouse on this project, building the backend systems in a very
stimulating environment.
So I'm a proud member of this great Apache community which allowed me to
improve my knowledge in unexpectable proportions and meet and work with great people
that share my love for clean architectures and innovative projects.
