Masterzen

Masterzen

You’ll find here my current and past thoughts about my work and hobbies, including but not limited to system administration, programming, photography ,boardgames or mechanical keyboards.

Bio

Things I remember with some nostalgia.

I used to grow up in Nantes. Plenty of good souvenirs.

The Studies Era

I moved to Paris at 18 to start studying in ESME Sudria a generic Engineering school.

I graduated in 1995, with a degree in "Electro-technics and High Power Electronic" (you know big electric motors for trains and such) with an Software Engineering option. My degree project was a 3D graphics renderer using radiosity based on this Siggraph article

The 3D software Era

After school, 3 friends and I founded a company called RAYflect where we were developing Ray Dream Studio, Photoshop and 3DS Max 3D plugins, our famous ones were named Four Elements, Four Seasons or Phototracer.

The company was eventually aquired by MetaCreations in 1999, and I went to work in their French subsidiary.

Founding another one

Back in 2000, the french MetaCreations subsidiary was closed, and the 9 engineers working there decided to start a new company called Tincell founded by an US VC fund called Ridge Venture.

We were mainly doing WAP services and Speech Recognition enabled phone services. The company unfortunately failed because we were really to early. At that same time I started doing Unix and Linux System Administration and Java development.

The boardgames Era at Days of Wonder

Then in 2002, my former boss and I joined a new project: a boardgame publishing house called Days of Wonder. The idea was to publish the best board games possible, but also their online counterpart.

I developped some Java based online games (including the now famous Ticket to Ride train board game.)  and built the infrastructure for the whole company using mostly Puppet.

I also created and developed a generic online game cluster for turn by turn board games written in Scala using Akka which is still in use for all our games.

The Asmodee times

Eventually, Asmodee acquired Days of Wonder to form Asmodee Digital in 2014.

There we opened what we developed at Days of Wonder to a larger audience with the aim to port the numerous Asmodee physical distinct boardgames to the digital and mobile world with great success. We're now operating a platform to develop games.

I'm now leading the infra team (especially our move to Kubernetes) and the online game service team, and acting as a technology architect.