Hello my name is Mathieu and i am a freelance technical expert consultant, focused for several years on elasticsearch / elastic stack / ELK technologies.
Self taught, i was interested in many technologies and finally i got specialised through my experiences and professionnal choices.
BETWEEN THEORY AND PRACTICE
- I generally dedicate more than 50% of my time to production (real life).
- I have still provided more than 110 trainings on elasticsearch / elastic stack.
- This allows me to share my experiences in training, to keep up to date with developments and to have a broader culture with the experience of multiple projects.
BORDEAUX AND THE REST OF THE WORLD
- I am originally from Bordeaux and remain based in this city.
- Nevertheless, I travel a lot for my services: Paris, the rest of France, Luxembourg, Switzerland...
- Remotely, I work with the entire world (USA, Belgium, India...).
MY JOURNEY
From development to databases, from startups to web agencies, from employee to freelancer, from production to training, from OPS to consulting, my journey has allowed me to explore many contexts.2000 -> FRONT -> BACK -> DATABASE
First, I was front end developper (HTML / CSS / PHP) in a very nice data storage startup in Bordeaux, working on project with millions of users. It was very fun, playing music and using drone sometimes with fellows. It helped me to develope a really enthousiast mindset about my job, IT and saas development: be cool and skilled at the same time.
I quickly evolved to backend team (still PHP) to work on an API used by the front end, desktop clients and external systems. It was only backend code, no more HTML / CSS.
2009 -> NOSQL / SCALABILITY
Then i evolved to the database team working with postgresql. I converted a hundred of api calls to stored procedure for each of them. It was the opporutinyy to work on a clustering / sharding attemps of postgresql so we could scale the service. It was really interesting because at this time NoSQL solutions are going main stream and fix this challenges. I also work on scalability, performance and architecture issues.
2010 -> CODE / PYTHON / FULL STACK
Then i have joined a leading innovative web agency in Bordeaux as backend developer. I worked on rebuilding a web service from scratch in python / django and adding an API, async tasks (celery) and communication with external systems. It was the opportunity to build a complete project and quit PHP for python, even if for a long time i dreamed to work with ruby as a freelancer.
2011 -> FREELANCE !
In 2011 i got the opportunity to become freelance: i am still freelance today. Its perfect for me to express my enthousiasm and got enough freedom to go to hackathons, conferences and meetups.
My first project is a tech lead position on a art database startup from Paris. So i am full stack (at this time nobody use this i guess) and work on a nice stack: ruby on rails, couchdb and ... elasticsearch !
2012 -> ELASTICSEARCH / PRESENTATIONS
Elasticsearch was not mainstream at this time. My portfolio get more experiences with it and so new clients come on this topic, and so i re-enforce my skills. I am excited and do some prezs in Bordeaux about elasticsearch with a real time data visualization in the browser. I still work with dataviz and so with Kibana. Maybe a day i will be data artist when i will be retired... or before !
2016 -> FULL ELASTIC STACK
Then in 2016 i decided to dedicate my time to elasticsearch and elastic technologies (Kibana, beats, logstash). It is still the case today. There is a lot of demands and the solution is complete and complexe enough so i am not bored to work with it. This is the opportunity to do a lot of training as instructor.
I do training on elastic stack and sometimes a lot in the same month.
About consulting i do both one shot short missions and long term collaborations. I have many clients, CAC 40 companies, banks, startups, small companies and even other freelance consultant.
Training makes me travel a lot in France, Luxembourg, Belgium, Switzerland...
So whats next ?
I work more and more internationaly and got more challenges outside France. Thats the plan. And maybe the next project will be your project ? Go back to me to write the next steps of the story !