Sylvain Wallez

I have been working at Joost for the last two years as architect of backend systems and tech leader of the backend development team. I started there at a time when the architecture of the system was a blank paperboard. Exciting times, that allowed me to use my creative thinking and build amazing stuff with an amazing team. But also exhausting times, that got me quite burned.

For the last 6 months or so, Joost has been undergoing many changes: organisational changes, stragegy changes (not yet publically visible), and geographical changes by concentrating the previously distributed teams and pushing west towards the US.

So all things considered, it was time for me to move on, and I was helped in that by a startup in Toulouse that I've been knowing since its inception because Anyware was participating to the development team. And since their inception, they wanted to have me on board.

So here it is: yesterday was my last day as a backend systems architect at Joost, and monday will me my first day as the CTO of Goojet.

Goojet is a widget platform and social network targetting mobile phones. Contrarily to other social networks, Goojet focuses on the collaboration between you and your contacts rather than you exposing or broadcasting information to your contacts. The world is made of interactions, not only of yelling at the masses.

My role there will be what I do best and like most: being a think tank, architect stuff, use my synthetic mind and teaching abilities to help the business and dev team understand each other, develop some of the tricky parts and generally give technical guidance and advice to the whole team. I also plan to participate in the nascent or ongoing standardization efforts in the widgets and mobile web domains, but I will first be heads down pushing our first public release out.

The really new technology for me at Goojet are mobile phones: I've been playing with J2ME on my free time for a few weeks, and it is kind of refreshing to work in a very constrained environment. Every line of code counts, no big framework, no high-level abstractions. And the device fragmentation, which requires careful engineering and testing. But it's fun!

So I'm pretty excited by this new job. I know it will be hard and demanding, but well, it seems quiet and easy jobs are not for me.