Philippe Jayet
Verified Expert in Engineering
Software Developer
Lausanne, Switzerland
Toptal member since February 9, 2022
Philippe is a strong technical leader with a passion for quality. He brings broad experience in software architecture and development (back end, front end, mobile, and embedded), DevOps, security, networking, and operations. Skilled in analytical thinking and competent on agile teams, he has created products used by millions across industries. Previous roles have included: CEO, co-founder, IT architect, head of mobile engineering, and senior software engineer.
Portfolio
Experience
- Ruby - 15 years
- Ruby on Rails (RoR) - 15 years
- Git - 15 years
- RSpec - 10 years
- DevOps - 10 years
- Redis - 10 years
- PostgreSQL - 5 years
- Heroku - 5 years
Work Experience
Co-founder | Software Architect | Senior Software Engineer
Easybox Technologies Sarl
- Developed a tool used in the hearing aids industry to run user studies of hearing aid prototypes. Involves an iPad app for the UI and logic and a custom-made electronic device for driving the prototypes and measuring all events.
- Worked on multiple IoT projects for different industries, such as home automation, neuroscience devices, or next-gen indoor sensors. Interested in communication protocols, power management, firmware updates, and good user experience.
- Took part in developing Switzerland's largest music portal, Mx3.ch, backed by public radios. Still hosting and maintaining this platform today, ensuring its availability at all times (99.96% in the last year). Built with Ruby on Rails.
- Developed the mobile app for Switzerland's largest music portal as soon as the iPhone SDK was announced in 2008. It involved writing an audio streaming engine from scratch. It was the second Swiss app on the App Store.
- Developed an iPad app, acting as a real-time sales assistant for pharmacists, and was deployed to Switzerland's largest chains of pharmacies.
- Created the back-office and eCommerce website for a leading bookstore chain in Switzerland, supporting them in their unique processes of sourcing books from distributors. Built with Ruby on Rails.
- Built many native iOS and Android mobile apps for public radio and television.
- Developed many web applications in Ruby on Rails for all kinds of industries. Gained extensive experience designing, implementing, and maintaining Rails apps with front ends, APIs, admin UIs, API integrations, good test coverage, etc.
Senior Software Engineer
EPFL Extension School
- Participated in the development of the online learning platform for the Extension School, ensuring a fantastic user experience for learners and course instructors. Technologies: Ruby on Rails, PostgreSQL, Redis, Elasticsearch, RSpec, Codeship, Heroku.
- Improved the comprehensive test suite for better structure, speed, coverage, and reliability: 5.000+ test cases running in 15 minutes, representing a 30% speed improvement.
- Maintained the main codebase, fixing reported bugs and keeping up-to-date components.
- Led the development of a free online learning platform for AI built with Ruby on Rails.
- Simplified the enrollment flow for new learners, resulting in an increased conversion rate.
- Expanded the developer tooling and set up, providing an out-of-the-box onboarding experience with Docker.
Platform Architect
Mixfit Inc.
- Architected the whole system, composed of a Rails back end, microservices, a React Native mobile app, an IoT device, and various third-party APIs.
- Led the back-end development, API integrations (Stripe, wearable devices, and food capture), IoT device software, and communication.
- Designed the Bluetooth LE and MQTT communication protocols of the IoT device.
- Specified the technical requirements for developing the next-generation IoT device and selected the partner company.
- Managed a distributed team of Rails and embedded developers.
- Showcased the product at CES 2019, which VentureBeat featured.
Head of Mobile Engineering
In&Win SA
- Developed a native iOS app to boost in-store traffic by making people earn "wins" when visiting stores.
- Experimented and fine-tuned the indoor detection and localization code and setup, a critical criterion of the product's success.
- Participated in various events to showcase the product and push user adoption.
- Assisted with the the hiring of additional mobile developers.
IT Specialist
Adventis SA
- Maintained an in-house Perl application used for monitoring large-scale networks, collecting NetFlow data from Cisco devices, and storing it in text files and an Oracle database after processing.
- Developed a network monitoring and alerting dashboard based on open source software such as Cacti, Nagios, and RRDtool.
- Maintained the company website and on-premises Linux server hosting it.
Project History
Mx3.ch: Swiss Music Portal
https://mx3.chIn addition to working on the Rails app, as soon as Apple released the iOS SDK back in 2008, I started working on a mobile app for Mx3.ch, providing an intuitive and simplified way of browsing the platform's contents and audio streaming. Developing the audio streaming engine was challenging during those early days due to the lack of any high-level library for such use. I had to code low-level, fetching audio packets at the HTTP/ICY level, decoding the compressed audio, and feeding the raw audio data to the system's audio frameworks. Mx3.ch Mobile was the second app from a Swiss brand to be present on the App Store.
Bookstore Back-office and eCommerce
A complete solution was delivered, composed of an eCommerce website for customers and POS orders, a back-office with full articles, customers, orders, invoicing and distribution network management, synchronization with multiple books databases, automatic fetching book covers, and more. I oversaw the hosting and maintained the platform on a custom server.
User Interaction Tool for Hearing Aids Prototypes
The iPad app and the device communicate through a custom Bluetooth LE protocol, and standard Bluetooth A2DP is used for audio streaming. This tool was and is still used to run user studies of prototypes for existing devices to fine-tune the interactions with users and next-gen devices to define new kinds of interactions.
In addition to the iPad app, the custom-made electronic device was entirely built by me, which implied components selection, schematics, PCB design, PCB layout, manual PCB assembly, PCB soldering using a custom-made reflow oven, quality assurance, and 3D design and printing of the enclosure.
Certifications
Principles of Reactive Programming
Coursera
Functional Programming Principles in Scala
Coursera
Skills
Libraries/APIs
REST APIs, Ruby on Rails API, ActiveRecord, iOS Native Libraries, Devise, Stripe, Sidekiq, Core Audio, AudioKit, React, Stripe API, D3.js
Tools
Git, Slack, RSpec, Xcode, GitHub, Hotwire, Turbo, GitLab, Codeship, SemaphoreCI, MQTT, Jira, Confluence, Cacti, Nagios, Android Studio, Visual Studio App Center, Ansible, Jenkins, Shell, Zsh, PCB Layout, Subversion (SVN), Capistrano, Grafana
Languages
Ruby, Swift, SQL, Objective-C, GraphQL, JavaScript, Scala, Embedded C, Python, Perl, HTML, CSS, PHP, Java, C, Bash, Bash Script, HTML5, Erlang, Erlang (OTP), Haml, XML
Frameworks
Ruby on Rails (RoR), iOS SDK, Ruby on Rails 5, Ruby on Rails 4, Android SDK, Core Bluetooth, Stimulus, Selenium, Qt, Core Location, Core Data, Flask, Cocoa, UIKit, SwiftUI, Tailwind CSS
Paradigms
REST, Unit Testing, Application Architecture, Back-end Architecture, Mobile Development, Mobile App Design, DevOps, Agile, Scrum, Cross-platform, Functional Programming, Functional Reactive Programming, Microservices, Actor Programming, Actor Model
Platforms
MacOS, Linux, iOS, Mobile, Visual Studio Code (VS Code), Heroku, Docker, Bluetooth Low Energy (LE), Debian, Debian Linux, Firebase, ARM Linux, Embedded Linux, AWS IoT, HockeyApp, Oracle, Unix, Solaris, Android, Ubuntu, Ubuntu Linux, OpenStack, Music Streaming, AWS IoT Core, Raspberry Pi, Arduino, Amazon Web Services (AWS)
Storage
JSON, Databases, PostgreSQL, Cloud Firestore, Redis, Elasticsearch, Amazon S3 (AWS S3), MySQL, MongoDB
Other
Software Architecture, Architecture, Mobile App Development, Localization, Back-end, Integration, Web Services, SDKs, Back-end Development, Back-end Performance, Documentation, Startups, APIs, iPad, Bluetooth, Internet of Things (IoT), MCU, Technical Leadership, TCP/IP, System Architecture, Scripting, Security, API Integration, Technical Architecture, Payment APIs, Microcontrollers, Embedded Systems, Embedded Software, Embedded Hardware, Wireless Communication, Electronics, ActiveAdmin, CI/CD Pipelines, ARM Embedded, Yocto, Schematics, IoT Security, BlueZ, GATT, iPhone, Beacon, Bluetooth Beacons, QR Codes, Networking, IP Networks, OSI Model, Linux Kernel, Open Source, Network Monitoring, NetFlow, System Administration, Cisco, CCNA, Debian Packaging, Servers, Networks, ESP32, FreeRTOS, Audio, Streaming, Printed Circuit Board (PCB), PCB Design, Sourcing, 3D, 3D CAD, 3D Printing, Audio Streaming, Audio Processing, Hardware, Hardware Design, Team Leadership, Remote Team Leadership, Cloud Infrastructure, WebSockets, Communication, Team Mentoring, Scraping, Web Scraping, Data Scraping, Akka Actors, Multithreading, GitHub Actions, Dashboards, Low-level Programming, CTO, Cellular, IoT Protocols, LoRa, LoRaWAN, Firmware, Embedded Development, WiFi
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