About

I'm Guillaume Besson and I spend a lot of my time coding and tinkering. I've been working with startups as a freelance developer for more than 9 years. I help them deliver fast, delightful and secure products by understanding the vision behind the product. I mainly use Typescript with NodeJS and React. I've been exploring a lot of different technologies, web-related or not while building expertise in Javascript and web architecture.

When I'm not coding, you can find me rock climbing, building drones, or cooking some quite good homemade pizzas.


How I work

I truly believe that code is one of the biggest enablers for tech startups. It's not the only one but it's the one I can help you with. Some technical decisions have a massive impact on the life of a product. It's the difference between a delightful product and a buggy one. Between a fast-moving team and an encumbered one. Between a codebase in which every new change enables faster work or slows down the product lifecycle.

There is an order of magnitude value difference between the best and worst decision. When taking into account the time to write the code, the risk of bugs, the scaling limits, the ease of future changes, and the complexity to understand it for future members of the team, it's almost impossible to be sure what the best solution is. Decision paralysis is also a big risk. This is why I spend a huge amount of time reading, learning, and making to have the best vision of possibilities and choose the best solution for each problem.

Technologies

I used many technologies, languages, frameworks, and libraries for different usages in my projects and professional missions. For every usage, I balance my knowledge of the technology and the fit with the problem to decide which to use. Here's a non-exhaustive list of things I worked with:

Expertise:

  • React
  • NodeJS
  • Typescript
  • PostgreSQL
  • Redis
  • GraphQL
  • AWS
  • GCloud
  • Linux
  • Real-time web
  • Web scaling
  • Web optimization
  • End-to-end encryption

Proficient:

  • C / C++
  • IoT (Internet of things): Arduino / ESP
  • NodeJS native addons
  • NoSQL (MongoDB, BigTable)
  • Web Audio
  • WebRTC
  • Offline-first apps
  • CRDT

Basic understanding:

  • Python
  • Elixir
  • Java
  • React-Native
  • Android
  • Rust