About Me

About Me

An early passion

As far as I remember I have always had a passion of hardware. From the very first machine I saw at school - I believe it was a Thomson TO7 - to the many ones I could use at my (lucky) friends’ and family: I had to look at them, it was like I was attracted! I didn’t know anything about computers, and there were so many different incompatible ones: Atari, Amstrad, Thomson, Oric,… The market was a lot more opened and sparsed than it is today.

I had to wait until 1989 to have my own PC. Well, not really mine since my brother, sister and I all shared it, but at least we owned one: a brand new Amiga 500 from Commodore :) I didn’t know it yet but my brother made the perfect choice: stereo sound with 4 sample channels, hardware scrolling & blitter, 32/64 colors from a palette of 4096, 24 DMA channels, etc… Although it had a true preemptive multitasking OS, most users barely saw it because lots of games would completely bypass it to take full advantage of the hardware. And OMG, you have no idea how many games I played. Amongst them were gems like Shadow of The Beast, Another World,… that are still valued and played nowadays.

Programming introduction

I had to wait for university and Turbo Pascal lessons to really get into the - development - game :) Although the environment was not very friendly (Turbo Pascal was text-based, ran on single tasking DOS, and didn’t provide direct support for VGA/Sound), it was for me a solid introduction to the big world of programming languages. And only later I discovered that Anders Hejlsberg was behind both Turbo Pascal & TypeScript :) I then quickly learned C/C++ & Java and made a few little programs mostly for the Amiga, which I believed back then could come back and rule the world (fool of me ;)).

In 1996, I discovered a wonderful world I’m still loving today: the web. For the first time, I could reach anyone in the world in just a few minutes, what a revolution! I learned HTML by looking at the source code of every site I visited: those were the days :) I then started working on PHP & MySQL, creating various websites for several companies. This was great, but something was missing…

A new addiction: UI

I quickly became interested in beautiful & easy to use interfaces and after a brief look at Flash/AS3 (thank you Steve Jobs!), I moved into the front-end development that allowed me to fullfill my two passions: development & design. I love intuitive interfaces but am also curious about how they are crafted. As a front-end developper I can do that with low level interfaces. My motto: the devil is in the details ;)

This kind of interface makes me smile:

tino-fran

This one, not so much:

taskbar blur delay

Today I work as a front-end developer, using modern technologies like React/TypeScript, and design systems like Blueprint. Very nostalgic of old computers, I often try to perfect my skills by revisiting the past: for example I wrote a PCX image viewer in NodeJS, and more recently wrote an Amiga music player using the AudioWorklet API.