About me

Born in the most beautiful city in the World, Antibes, in the days of the General de Gaulle, my teenage years saw the most fantastic inventions: Rubik's cube, windsurfing, arcade games, D&D, programmable calculators, the PC... Being a geek wasn't a social status to boast about yet !

I have been the lucky owner of a (genuine) IBMpc extremely early, as my father who was working for IBM swiftly replaced the turbocharged ZX81 I had been using until then. I guess I can claim I have been coding everyday ever since I crossed paths with a TI-57, quite a long time ago now. I was always looking for a challenge, in the 80's I was rendering furniture in 3D using an Hercules card, I experimented with digital photography on Canon iON ; in the 90's, I left the French Riviera for Paris where I found many interesting projects like writing a visual train circulation planning tool for the SNCF.

An then, 1994, I join the absolutely bonkers people at HaïKu Studios... Writing videogames is the most exciting thing I have done in my life, whatever anyone in the team does, it is "turned up to 11", whether it's about technic, creativity or motivation. It was a fascinating period of time that saw the appearance of the CD-ROM and the first 3D accelerators. When HaïKu had to shut down, I followed the part of the team, including my brother, who had joined Bits Studios in London, where we spent fabulously rich years with the N64, XBox, PS/2 and the infancy of online games.

2005, back to France, in parallel with contracting work, I started revisiting photo cataloguing, with the view of accelerating all operations as if they were part of a game. While in the process of putting together a concept around pan+zoom, I heard that Intel was finally joining the GPU race, boldly architecting it on an x86 foundation. The Larrabee adventure was a fascinating one, even if it only lasted for a short time. I went back to my futuristic photo library concept, inside Intel this time, where it became a bit like a concept-car, letting us evaluate performances in a forward looking context. Technologies keep evolving and, over and again, everything is to be invented !

But I'm not just a geek, I've also been known as a keen epicurean, with a soft spot for restaurants, bakeries, delicatessen and winemongers, all these places with stories to share, secrets to reveal and good times to be had. I even had the opportunity to combine geek and foodie when I met Nicolas Gautier, with whom we created Baladovore, and app that referenced the food producers who chef's get their supply from, so everybody can easily locate delicious+authentic products from human sized operations.

Also, I can have a tendency to be a bit long winded...