My name is Frank Rousseau, I'm 43 years old and I've been a web addict for more than 25 years. I love using and understanding web applications as much as I enjoy building them. I created my first website in 1997, it was a poetry registry. Since then, I've never stopped. Watching, showing, sharing, learning, doing with people from all over the world, are not things you can give up easily. It's something I want to experience forever.

Career

I'm the creator of Kitsu and the CEO of CGWire, the company behind the project. Kitsu is a project management tool for creative studios that simplifies communication and eases collaboration. By working better together, studios using Kitsu improve their work conditions and the movie quality. Today around 100 studios use our solutions through our services and we counted 300 self-hosted installations.

Prior to this, I co-founded Cozy Cloud as CTO, a startup that built FOSS personal clouds. We were a remote office team of 20 people. I really enjoyed that experience and learned a lot from it. I had to leave the company for sad reasons, but the journey was unique.

Today, I'm working on improving Kitsu and widening its adoption. At CGWire, we expanded our mission: serving creative teams all over the world to make people more empathetic. Humanity faces its greatest challenges. Collective intelligence is key to dealing with them, and empathy enables it.

For my side projects, I'm still interested in personal data control and self-hosting, especially in the age of LLMs and AI agents. I'm tinkering with a few things on this topic.

Press

Socials

I like to share my thoughts about software development, decentralization and self-hosting on the following medias:

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Inspirations

For my working activities, Rework and The Laws of Simplicity are a great source of ideas. With their pragmatic frameworks, they help me to deal with uncertainty and achieve goals.

When it's about building a team or a community I dig into Turn your ship around and the chapter 6 of the ZMQ guide. They give good tips about making people work well together and connect their strengths.

I read a lot about personal development, but finally, when I need confidence and courage I think about Naruto and Luffy (One Piece). They never give up and can see when people have something good inside them. When it's time to be a little bit cynic, glamorous and honest I turn to Canardo. My last discovery is the funny and humble One Punch Man. I like how he stays simple despite his super powers.

But overall, the text that resumes the best my way of living is The Life Manifesto.

Talks

I gave talks about open source, animation pipelines, privacy, and web development at the following events:

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Open source

I have done most of my Free software contributions on my own projects: Kitsu and Cozy. I wrote a full retrospective 🔗 (fr) about my experience.

Aside of my main projects I did some open source contributions:

• I wrote a Python client for Open Food Facts.
• I helped to build the first version of the Diaspora* API.
• I wrote request-json, a tiny Node.js library to deal easily with REST APIs.

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Past projects

Cozy

Cozy makes the personal server as simple to use as a smartphone. It turns a hardware of yours in a personal assistant that collects and connects your data. With it your digital life becomes smoother and your privacy is respected. We had thousands of active users, we raised an overall of $6M, had a team of twenty and attracted hundreds of contributors.

Newebe

Newebe was a distributed social network. Every user hosted their account. It allowed social interaction without compromising your privacy. It didn't get any adoption but it was a kind of research lab for me around privacy and self-hosting.

Artforge

As a full-time employee, I worked on Artforge, a web application suite dedicated to CG studios that aims to improve team collaboration. I built most of the application UIs. Unfortunately, the company closed and the software is discontinued.

Dolebraï

Dolebraï was a web radio that broadcasted and promoted open music. There were monthly mixes and a blog about open music news. The website and the radio are no more available.

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Artwork below was made by Diana Rovanio