Benjamin Bouvier
Benjamin Bouvier

What I've Made On Year 2014

Posted on Mon 16 March 2015 in opensource life • 3 min read

I've stumbled across espadrine's blog post about his accomplishments in 2014 and found it was a really good idea. It matters a lot to acknowledge your own accomplishments, without being overly proud about them, just to realize you're not an impostor, and that you bring value to your company and deserve your current position (yes, there probably will be more about the so-called impostor syndrome on this blog).

open-source

  • I've started kresus, which is probably my biggest personal open-source project so far. It is a personal finance manager, a la Linxo / Mint / Bankin, et al. The only difference is that you can self-host it (if you have the chance to own a CozyCloud instance, which you can also self-host). It is a fork of another open-source project, cozy-pfm, which hasn't been maintained for long and whose owner made a few technical choices I didn't personally like (using backbone was the biggest one).
  • minstrel is a non official Spotify for Firefox OS app (a.k.a web app). In particular, it spawns a proxy server that can read your Spotify playlists, stream tracks in real-time, encode them in real-time before streaming them back to a simple HTML5 audio tag. The web frontend can also synchronize your tracks locally, so that you can still listen to your tracks even when you're offline, using the awesome localForage library.
  • A few small contributions to different cozycloud projects, among which I'd like to highlight the app update notification in cozy-home ("hey, this app has a new version, go update it if you want to!").
  • diary, a tent blogging application which I started earlier in 2013. I've stopped working on it as I don't have a lot of traction in the tent community.
  • gsd, a todo list app started in December 2013, to experiment with angularjs. Stopped development as I found out about tasky and bullet journaling.
  • extended lebonsite a few by adding a new frontend that includes realtime search. This app works along with lebonscrap and allows you to aggregate flat search results (it's deeply localized to France's flat search websites) and quickly go through them. Update: if you're interested in the changes I've made, they are in the angular branch of my repository.
  • as my job is about working in open-source, the next paragraph also applies here.

school/job

In March 2014, I've got an engineering diploma in computer science from INSA Lyon, with the highest possible honors (in French, "félicitations du jury"). Again, not being cocky: graduating with honors is pretty classic and doesn't mean anything regarding your actual knowledge / level in anything.

I've been hired as a full-time employee by Mozilla at the end of January, following my internship during Summer 2013. I work in the Platform team, in the JavaScript Engine sub-team. My main focuses have been extending asm.js, to help proving that the web platform is ready for gaming. I mostly implemented SIMD.js in Firefox this year (if you're interested in reading more about this, feel free to read the official Mozilla blog post I've co-written).

what about 2015

I'd like to get more focused in cloud services that you own and have control on, as I think this is the thing that matters the most, nowadays.

Also, I wish I can keep on learning new things, by myself or on massive online open courses. As a newcomer in adulthood, I would also like to learn how to take advantage of every single hour of every single day, that is, not getting stuck in a routine and waking up one day thinking "man, I'm already that old?". Oh boy, there are only 24 hours a day.