About Me

My name is Nicolas Lalevée and I am a French geek/nerd/hacker (pick your term, I just love my job) with a mediterranean heart as my childhood was in front of that beautiful sea.

Just a teenager I started to not only use computers but try to improve them. It first started with a Ti-89 calculator. So I started at a very low level with some 68k assembly. Then I quickly learned C thanks to Kernighan and Ritchie to avoid some headache. My first lines of code can be found in the attic.

Then I discovered Java in my french engineering school which I found pretty cool in transforming segmentation faults into NPEs. I did a quick tour in the research department, where I learned so much about model design and computer science, I wouldn’t be the software engineer I am today without that internship.

But I missed to much writing code, so I started to work in a startup where I discovered the web applications, the open source and the Apache Foundation via Sylvain Wallez. Thanks to him I learn about the Apache projects, but most of all about the community spirit of the foundation.

Working on different projects I had the opportunity to learn about some existing technologies (Lucene, Eclipse), some which opened my mind (Spring, OpenRDF), and some which got me some great challenge (XSLT, OpenOffice, FOP, CAS).

Along the way, I always had a particular interest into the tools we use every day to develop. Hence, after some huge frustrations with Maven, I got to learn about Ivy and got so deep and involved, by fixing, improving, patching it, that I became an Ant committer.

Continuing to develop web applications, the challenge continued to raise, especially at Scoop.it. So I learned about all kind of distributed databases and parallel processing (NoSQL and BigData are the hype words these days). In particular I got pretty close to the internals of Cassandra. There is also the amazing Elasticsearch which I embraced from the first time I read its homepage. And I have the use of an Hadoop cluster on which we run Hive.

Along learning how to use these "BigData" technologies, I am beginning to learn thanks to François at Datasio what we can actually do with all of that data. It is quite mind blowing, and altogether so exciting, so much to learn, so much busy exciting days to come!

Still not bored of reading from me ? You can read more or found out more about me:

And pretty much everything I hack can be found on . GitHub: https://github.com/nlalevee.