Outside of the professional field, I like photography and hiking. This is why I created the French Riviera Hiking Meetup group to meet people from all over the world around hiking in the Alpes Maritimes. Because I like to couple personal projects with my passions, I decided a few years ago with friends from the Meetup group to create the OpenTracks project in my spare time.

OpenTracks is a website (https://opentracks.app) but also an iOS (link) and Android (link) application intended for people who like walks, hikes, snowshoe hikes, trails and treks.

Thanks to the OpenTracks application, you can search for hikes according to a lot of selection criteria but you can also perform the selected activities from your mobile thanks to the integrated GPS and the optimized offline mode to ensure that you are not lost but also by optimizing the battery usage. I invite you to explore the OpenTracks website and the descriptions of the mobile applications in more detail to discover more about the multiple features of the application and do not hesitate to create an account on the application if you are interested by the application.

I take advantage of the development of the application to improve my knowledge in JavaScript front-end and backend (OpenTracks is an application entirely developed in Javascript) as well as in mobile development which was an area that was relatively theoretical for me until now and to create a robust architecture that would allow to have pages displayed in SSR (for SEO), while being optimized on mobile. A difficult technical challenge but not uninteresting :)

I took advantage of this project to implement Test Driven Development in the application lifecycle. A small waste of time at the start of the project but which is now a considerable time saver thanks to the automatic tests which have been enriched over the versions of the application and which contributes to the continuous improvement of the quality of the application by avoiding regressions.

After a few months of work, the new design of my personal website is now published online. Because the previous website design was created 8 years ago, I decided to recreate the website design from scratch in order to improve my web design skills. The new design has now been fully integrated into Wordpress with an internationalisation mechanism in order to continue to display the content of pages and articles in French and English (I think it is still important to me to practice both languages despite the fact it takes more time to write pages and articles). As a software engineer, I believe it is important to constantly learn about new technologies. That's why I always try to learn and practice by working on some personal projects (I will develop in more detail in a future article). Therefore, I have used my need to improve my web design skills in this redesign work. I have also tried to optimise the design for desktop computers, tablets and smartphone. I will continue to fix some bugs found and to make some other improvements in some future time. In the blog, I will continue to write some articles about technological subjects, my professional experiences and some other articles worth sharing. Don't hesitate to follow me on Twitter, LinkedIn, Viadeo and GitHub by using my website links.

Thanks to the experience at Air France, I had the chance to be initiated to best practises for Search Engine Optimisations (SEO). After having read several articles found inside the web, I decided to practise these new knowledge for the new website developed for Noëlie Serries, osteopath at Cannes La Bocca. You can find below some examples of user experience improvements and search engine optimisations:

• Performances improvement (use of browser cache and applicative cache, code minifier)
• Website optimised for mobile and tablet
• Improved HTML with semantic data
• Links to social networks
• Optimisation of search engines important content (canonical URL, meta, title and header tags)
• Internationalisation

Link to the website of Noëlie Serries - Osteopath

Apart from my job, I like to go hiking and discover new landscapes and wildlife that I like to photograph with my digital SLR camera. I am also always interested and passionate about exploring new destinations and new countries. During the various hikes or trips that I have made with my friends or with my Meetup group, I noticed that the pictures I took were only used for a short time before being archived in a directory that was almost never opened. Moreover, when some people asked me to recommend them, I thought it would be more convenient if I could show them the pictures I took on a map. The Photo Travel project was born. The aim of Photo Travel is to display photos of trips, hiking and events on a map for people interested in a particular destination, a particular hike or a local event. Link to Photo Travel.

DDBS Toolkit project is now available as an open source project at ddbstoolkit.cyril-grandjean.fr