Romain Pechayre

🤝 Pleased to meet you too!

My name is Romain Pechayre, I am a software engineering manager working at Pennylane, previously co-founder and CTO at Yeeld. From 2010 to 2017 I was co-founder and CTO at Eventmaker.

👤 About me

On a day to day basis, I am involved in coding, product strategy, and team organization. I have developed an obcession about company culture over the years.

I've worked with various technologies in my career, but I found that common challenges appear in all of them:

• Making a code base understandable and maintainable over the years
• Streamling deployment processes
• Finding the right pull request workflow to reduce human intervention to the strict minimum
• Naming things correctly and consistently (files, modules, classes, functions, slack channels, etc.)
• Avoiding rewrites
• Fixing technical debt smartly and progressively
• Aligning product teams on company goals
• Optimizating for milestones instead of stacking micro features

📚 Yeeld Stack

Yeeld back-end stack uses Spring Boot with Kotlin, PostgreSQL, Kafka, Elixir, Go + some Node.js and Python. Almost everything runs on our self-managed Kubernetes Cluster in AWS. PostgreSQL is provided by RDS and our Kafka Cluster is self-managed.

Our mobile app uses React Native and Typescript. It's consuming a GraphQL API using the Apollo client. We use the awesome apollo-tooling to generate TypeScript interfaces out of our GraphQL queries.

📚 Eventmaker Stack

Eventmaker is an event management software I joined from 2010 to 2017 as the CTO and co-founder. It's a boostrapped, profitable and growing Company, and it's still very healthy as of december 2020 😍.

The stack if mostly Ruby On Rails and MongoDB. It uses React.js in the front-end and after building our own Heroku style inernal PaaS that served production from 2012 to 2016, we finally adopted Kubernetes and the team is still using it today.

[..2010] Prior to Eventmaker

I orginially graduated from the Ecole Polytechnique in France with majors in Applied Maths and Economics. I then studied at the London School of Economics for a MCs in Operational Research.

My first job was in Operational Reasearch departement at Air France. During my time at Air France, I was with a team of fantastic engineers whose role was to design and code optimization algorithms in C++. Folks from this team strong sense of business as well as very technical aspects, which was usual in 2008.

During that time, I worked a few personal projects. Those help me understand the broad set of technologies that was available:

• 2009: Virtual Metronome iPhone app. This was the early days of iPhone development
• 2009: openpivot. A C++ pivot table features. It was really fast and allowed to pre aggregate data to make it fit into MS Excel 2007
• 2010: Zxing contributor. ZXing was a Google Project developing QR Code scanning technologies for Android. I was the one who made it work in iPhone as well and became the author of the official iPhone app.