My name is François, I’m a french guy living in Japan for almost 20 years now. I worked 5 years for a big french automotive company as a System Analyst/Engineer somewhere deep in Saitama. Now I’ve moved on to a nicer setting in downtown Tokyo working in different big global tech companies.
Here are a few facts about me:
- I’m a co-founder of the successful french website MacBidouille.com
- It has spawned an english version at HardMac.com
- I’m bilingual in french and english thanks to studying at EABJM in Paris as a kid
- There, I also studied japanese for 9 years, but I could barely make a sentence before coming to Japan
- I graduated with an Engineering degree (major in Information Systems) in September 2004
- After that I worked as a freelance web application developer to pay for my numerous travels around the world, all the while looking for a good job in Japan
- I finally found it and moved to Japan in November 2005 with a 2 year contract
- I was hired in Nov. 2007 in that same big French company, working on R&D Information Systems
- In May 2011, I grew tired of the Japanese countryside and the lousy economic prospects of the automotive industry so I took a job at a software company in downtown Tokyo.
- Now I work at a big American tech company that underpins pretty much everything you ever do on Internet.
Other links of interest:
- My web presence portal (fancy word for “links to my profiles around the web”)
- Sunsetter, a little web app I made on my spare time to calculate when I can see the sunset behind Mt. Fuji from my window
- A post I made describing my job as of February 2009
- Inheritance Tax Calculator, a simple React app to estimate your potential exposure to inheritance tax as a foreigner in Japan.
- EpicForge.app, my first foray into the world of indie hackers and one-man SaaS apps, is a tool to make it easy to clone and generate whole JIRA issues structures based on templates you setup. I’ve been using this internally in my job for many years and decided it might be good enough that other people might pay for it. Who knows… 🤞