Olivier Laviale Staff Engineer

Hi! I'm Olivier 👋 Welcome to my blog. I write about what I do as Staff Engineer. I also write about my open-source projects and software development in general. I enjoy a bit of singing, in a choir or a karaoke bar, but I don't write about that. I'm originally from Toulouse in France, but I've been living in Berlin since 2014. Still dressing in colors though.

You can browse my articles on the home page or check my résumé below. You can also find me on GitHub and LinkedIn. Or you can follow me on Twitter before it collapses.

Professional Summary

I'm usually appreciated for my support, ownership, autonomy, drive for excellence, communication skills, and expertise in creating or improving system designs. I thrive working on multi-team, cross-functional projects. I led all of them with success.

Skills

• Project Management
• Team ceremonies
• Best practices: Event storming, Domain-driven design, Pair-programming, Application layering, Hexagonal architecture, Testing
• Programming languages: C#, Go, JavaScript, PHP, C, ASM 680x0
• Human languages: French (native), English (fluent), German (A2.1), Spanish (notions)
• Data stores: MySQL, Postgres, SQL server, MongoDB, Redis
• Infrastructure: Kubernetes, Ambassador, AWS
• System Design: PlantUML, OpenAPI, AsyncAPI

Experience

Wayfair・Staff Engineer | Oct. 2021–Apr. 2023・Berlin

My team owned the carrier networks. We created an application that was ingesting data from many carriers to provide a standardized interface to our internal services. The data would include stations, lanes, operating times, and ancillary entities.

• Led a multi-team initiative to expand our last-mile network into an end-to-end network that included suppliers and middle-mile data, to improve cost calculation and delivery time estimates.
• Led an initiative that reduced database usage by 75%.
• Led six interactive sessions about software design and testing practices that led to improvements to the code base and a significant shift in developers' approach to testing.
• Contributed to creating a tool that empowered stakeholders to manage facility closures without the help of developers.
• Overhauled the daily work of my team to improve deliveries with better ceremonies, better use of epics, and shorter tickets.
• Led three Event Storming sessions to capture the supply chain domains.
• Participated in the hiring process: SQL, system design

HelloFresh・Staff Engineer | Apr. 2015–Sep. 2021 ・ Berlin

Rocket Internet sent me to HelloFresh for six months to support their rapid growth before they hired me. Within six years, I grew up from Senior Engineer to Chapter Lead, then Staff Engineer.

• Mentored five engineers to get started with Go, for three months each.
• Made over thirty presentations to improve the skills of the developers in my chapter.
• Led a multi-team, cross-functional initiative that improved the user experience with My Deliveries, the most visited screen at HelloFresh.
• Led an initiative to create the first auth filter at HelloFresh.
• Created the Chapter Days as an experiment for my chapter to pay its technical debt, which was quickly adopted by other chapters.
• Contributed to the redesign of the experimentation infrastructure.
• Led a multi-team, cross-functional initiative that reduced the menu size by 97% and the latency by 66%.
• Extracted services from the API monolith for recipes and menus.
• Appointed as the owner of the API monolith. Introduced better practices and did a lot of upgrades to reduce the burden of working with the code base.
• Enabled HelloFresh to open in Belgium with content in French and Dutch with minimal effort by creating a system that allowed entities to have multiple languages.
• Participated in the hiring process: technical screening

Rocket Internet・Senior Software Engineer | Dec. 2014–Mar. 2015 ・ Berlin

Backend development. I joined a team mid-project and helped deliver Vendito, a rival to OLX and Gumtree.

Monkees・Senior Software Engineer | Sep. 2012–Nov. 2014 ・ Berlin

Fullstack development on personal CMS and Drupal. Created a client for Salesforce's API. CI/CD with Jenkins and Travis-CI. Some references: 3SI, TransitionsPro, Réseau Mazda, Intermarché, Nutrikéo, and Pfizer.

Hima360・Software Engineer | Jul. 2009–Aug. 2012 ・ Toulouse

Backend development on personal CMS, Wordpress, and Drupal. Some references: Atalian, Berger-Levrault, Cancer-bio-santé, Compobaie, Curtina, Emailvision, Europa-organisation, Eurorégion, and Pole Star.

Orealys・Software Engineer | Mar. 2008–Jun. 2009 ・ Toulouse

Backend development. Modernization of the in-house CMS (Isens Evolution). Punctual trainer in French and English on the in-house CMS. Some references: Agronutrition, APEM, CCI Ariège, Lingari, and Sylob.

Freelance・Developer and Designer | 2006–Feb. 2008 ・ Toulouse

Design and Fullstack development. Some references: chilia.fr, cinqcinq.com, leventre.com, and sideralsante.fr.

Other experiences

Video editor. Short movies party organizer. Queer party organizer / DJ. Gave up on my bachelor in Psychology to become a developer.

Open-source contributions

Here are a few highlights of my open-source contributions. More on GitHub.

• Created a Composer plugin to collect PHP 8.0 attributes. Featured on JetBrains' PHP Annotated.
• Created a Multilingual Inflector, with over 1M downloads.
• Created an internationalization package that was used for a few years by Prestashop.
• Improved the sorting algorithm of Composer, the package manager for PHP.
• Created the framework ICanBoogie, for PHP.
• Created the UI framework Feelin, for AmigaOS and friends.