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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