Hi! My name is Sylvain Wallez. I'm 41 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:
As said above, I'm 41 and live in Toulouse. I'm married and we
have two sons who are 17 and 12.
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. During these 10 years, I always had semi-official 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 grow up to 60 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 be an early member of the
Joost team to work with many other people from major open-source organizations
such as Apache and Mozilla. A new step in my progression in this world.
I worked for 2 years there, architecting and builing the backend systems of Joost
with more than 15 people in Toulouse in a very
stimulating multi-national environment.
In early 2008, Anyware was sold for 11 million euros, and Joost had major management changes that led
it to concentrate on the US market and invite its employees to move to New York city. The valley would
have been an option, but the overcrowded New York wasn't appealing to me.
So I joined the newly formed Goojet as a CTO. Goojet is a social network and widget platform for mobiles. It
started from the fact that typing a URL on a phone is complicated, and that managing bookmarks is
close to impossible, so using social network virality could boost the usage of mobile web. Part of my job
is to shoe-horn OpenSocial in mobiles,
and new phones (fancy or clumsy) arrive on my desk every week!
As a conclusion, I must say I owe a lot to 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. I wouldn't be where I am
if Apache had not been there.
