Hello there

I'm Thomas, a Ruby on Rails developer. This is where I write down what I learn, what surprises me, and sometimes what I haven't figured out yet.

First, a word about my path, since it explains the tone of these notes.

From one code to another

I started with law, which, as the French saying goes, leads to everything¹, up to a master's degree in industrial property law. Entrepreneurship was already taking over my reading list, so I went on to a specialised master's in innovation management at emlyon, then spent two years in Tel Aviv. There, I helped French companies and startups protect what they invented, right in the middle of the Start-up Nation. I saw the entrepreneurial frenzy up close, and the unfair advantage of people who can code.

As my assignment was ending, my best friend, a product manager, told me about Le Wagon. That's when I understood what had been bugging me: an impact I could barely see, and a career that felt too mapped out. I signed up planning to become a product manager at Doctrine, a French legal tech. Instead, I fell in love with building products with my own hands, and landed my first developer job.

After a formative stint at Paris City Hall², I joined Getaround, a car rental marketplace that runs in several countries. I found a talented, ambitious and genuinely kind team (a word that gets thrown around a lot, but here people really are). As both a developer and the manager of three senior developers, I went through the integration of the US app into our European Rails monolith, and led the import of cars from their database into ours. Then Getaround closed its US operations, refocused on Europe and became profitable 🎉. I went back to being a full-time developer, right when LLMs were smashing our working habits.

In the evenings, once my wife and son are asleep, I keep learning and building, to sharpen my technical skills and to test the ideas that pop into my head³. The rest of the time, I play tennis, read about history and watch football (the real one, played with the feet).

Why write

Three reasons, more selfish than they look.

First, to share. My background mixes three trades: law, product and code. I'm neither an engineer nor a manager by training. I bring business sense and a product mindset, and on the technical side I learn backwards, from high-level languages down to computer science fundamentals, to catch up with colleagues who came out of engineering schools. I experiment, keep up with what's new, and happily mentor junior developers, many of them bootcamp graduates like me⁴. What I discover along the way might help someone else.

Then, to avoid making the same mistakes twice. Explaining a problem in my own words is how I check that I've understood it; when I can't, I know what I still have to learn. And the day I run into the same race condition or the same time zone bug again, the answer will already be here.

Finally, to keep my writing sharp, an occupational habit: law taught me how much the written word weighs. Writing well makes working with my colleagues easier, and now with AI too: better input, better output⁵.

What you'll find here

Notes, sorted by topic:

• engineering: Rails, databases, the craft of keeping software simple, and the computer science fundamentals I discovered late;
• AI the way I actually use it, to work better and to build a new kind of feature;
• product, with the end user as the compass;
• my experiences;
• and a few thoughts that don't fit anywhere else.

No promised schedule. I'll write when I have something to say. That's an easier promise to keep.

And if you have a sharp eye, look at the desk around the page (on a wide screen). The debugging duck changes outfits with the seasons, and puts on its nightcap in dark mode. It listens to all my problems without judging, and makes me explain them simply. It's my most loyal pair programmer, and it doesn't burn a single token.

Thanks for taking the time to read. To reply, push back or point out a typo: LinkedIn or GitHub.