Work experiences

After learning Microsoft Basic (not Visual at that time) and Cobol at school, I discovered Business Basic at my first employer Prologic. It was 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.

Prologic sub-contracted its legacy software development and support duties in 1996, and the staff was moved to Cap Gemini, where new methodologies were introduced, such as using industry standard version control (Merant PVCS)  and support ticketing management, instead of the more limited in-house systems.

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.

At that time, Prologic was introduced on the Paris market exchange as Optims, and in 2003, was purchased by the Amadeus group to become Amadeus Hospitality.

Projects to rewrite the hospitality application modules using the Microsoft .Net platform were under the hood, so I was trained in C# WinForms as well as SQL Server but due to further strategy changes, I did not actually use these new skills in a professional environment.

In November 2007, I was 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 December 2018, I was 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 had 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.

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).

With the covid-19 pandemic and its economic turmoil making it more difficult to find a full-time job, I then founded a one-person company and started working as a freelance programmer, mainly for Artic with .Net and Java, but also for other smaller client projects using PxPlus.

During my time as a freelance developer, I have been contacted by the IT manager of an agricultural cooperative who found my LinkedIn profile while searching for a ProvideX specialist. This cooperative used a software package developed in ProvideX, sold by a Paris-based company named Gicasa Informatique, which I happened to know from my years at Amadeus Hospitality, as I did some demos and training for them, when they were considering a migration of their applications from Thoroughbred to ProvideX. The company has been purchased by a Brittany-based competitor, Kerhis, a few years ago. As a support analyst and developer position opened at Kerhis in the Gicasa support team, I was contacted a few months later and joined the company on June 1st, 2021, returning at the same time to the ProvideX community.

About one year after starting a new job at Kheris, I was contacted by the CEO of Visserie Service, whom I had met in 2017 when he was trying to hire another developer. Visserie Service is located near Le Mans, about 225 kms from Paris and remote work was not as current at the time we met as it is now after a year of covid confinement. We agreed on me joining the company to work both on the internal ERP originally written in Basis BBx and converted to ProvideX and PxPlus, and also on interfaces with other apps and webservices. Mainly the Prestashop e-commerce websites, as well as a lot of APIs with various third-party partners (carriers, translation services, etc...). The company opened 8 additional websites to cover most European countries (Belgium, Germany, UK, Netherlands, Denmark, Portugal, Spain, Italy) in the summer and autumn of 2022. I have been modifying the ERP here and there, as well as writing replacement code for the old interface logic. It was previously using both ProvideX and PHP code to work with Prestashop and I have developed a framework of PxPlus classes that use an HTTP request/response client and XML parsing/editing to speak more directly to the API.