Home
My name is Stéphane Devouard. I live and work near Paris, France.
I have been a software programmer for 30 years now. After learning Microsoft Basic (not Visual at that time) and Cobol at school, I discovered Business Basic at my first employer Amadeus Hospitality. It is a software company developing, marketing and supporting vertical solutions for the hospitality industry : property management systems, central reservation systems for hotels, and point of sales, inventory control solutions for restaurants.
I worked 9 years on Thoroughbred Basic, first on T/OS proprietary systems, then on SCO System V and AIX servers. I discovered the ProvideX Business Basic development toolset in 1997 on the web, a couple of weeks after I got my very first internet account. One year after, the management of my company finally decided to switch their flagship product called HOTIX from CHUI+Tbred+Unix to GUI+ProvideX+Windows and we created a new product called Visual Generation from this legacy application.
The ProvideX language allowed me to discover modern technologies such as event-driven programming, object-oriented programming, COM programming, relational databases. I attended several ProvideX Conferences in Las Vegas and Orlando, and became a member of the ProvideX Beta users group in 2000.
In November 2007, I have been contacted by Explorer Software Inc. and joined the company in March 2008 as a software developer working remotely from my home office near Paris. I was integrated to the development team who did the barebone work of converting Explorer Software's flagship product, Contract Manager, an ERP for construction companies, from a Windows-only solution (using the WindX thin client) to a Windows and Web product.
After the migration to a browser-based interface was completed, I worked on creating several new modules in the system :
- a screen Personalizer allowing end-user to customize standard application forms as well as adding User-Defined Fields
- a Web Services API used by 3rd party applications to retrieve information or post data to the system (get master tables records, import transactionnal data, etc...)
- a queue processing daemon designed to improve end-user experience by performing major database updates asynchronously.
- .Net classes used by the application code via COM/ActiveX to gain access to some technologies not supported natively by the ProvideX language (Crystal Reports interface, emails with STARTTLS security protocol, ZIP archives support)
In November 2018, I have been let go by Explorer Software. After looking for new job opportunities, either in the ProvideX / PxPlus environment, or in the Microsoft .Net environment where I have some basic knowledge (C#, Visual Basic, MSSQL, ASP.Net), I found myself lacking some of the skills required for nowadays web development. I decided to attend a Web Developer training program that was funded by the french job agency. I started this training program on May 15, 2019.
My new skills include :
- Javascript and jQuery as well as a few CSS (mainly Bootstrap)
- Hybrid mobile app development using the Ionic V4 framework based on AngularJS
- PHP (procedural and OOP)
- MySQL and PDO
- Symfony V4 PHP framework
- Agile methods
- UML application design
- Java SE with the Swing GUI library, Java EE servlets & JSPs, JDBC
- Big Data (MongoDB, Redis, Cassandra, Neo4j)
- Android mobile app development
After 5 months of courses, I spent a 3 months internship period in the development department of the Artic company to use these skills for designing and coding a real-world application, before the final exam where I validated my bachelor-degree certification (RNCP niveau 6, Bac +3/+4 in the french educational system).
On a more personal side, I met my wife Patricia at work and we've been married for 28 years. We have two sons, Mathias (27) and Valentin (19).
My other addictions include reading sci-fi and fantasy books, playing table-top, pen&paper role-playing games, watching action movies and listening to jazz-funk, soul, electro and pop-rock music.
Last update January 2020