Frank Rousseau's Homepage

My photo

My name is Frank Rousseau, I’m 40 years old and I've been a web addict for more than 20 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

After several years working as a consultant and a developer, I co-founded Cozy Cloud, a startup that built FOSS personal clouds. I was the CTO of the company and grew the product and tech teams to 18 people. We were a remote office team and we did free open source software, so we had to manage the contributions from the community. 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.

Toady, I'm working on the CGWire project as CEO. We build collaboration tools for for Animation and VFX studios. By bringing their workflow to the next step, we improve work conditions and movies quality. 75 studios and 10 schools already use our solutions through our services (and dozens more use it by their own).

Press

Some interviews and articles where I'm mentioned in: Wired, Venture Beat, French Web, Framablog, Journal du Hacker, IndieHackers, Indie Makers Allan Caeg's podcast, Blender and Mediakwest.

Contact

Email: frank[at]addictedtointer.net

Social

I like to share my thoughts about software development, startups and self-hosting. You can read them 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, glamourous 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

During my previous experiences, I performed talks about Free and Open Source technologies. I had the opportunity to speak at JDLL, RMLL, DotJs, ParisJs, ParisWeb, LyonJS, NodeJS Paris, Human Talks, PyConFr, Tech.Rocks, Annecy MIFA, Quantified Self Europe, FOSDEM, FOSDEM again, and Hy! Berlin.

The main subjects I adressed in my talks were software development, UI design basics and agile methodologies.

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Open source

I'm working very slowly on a side project named Personal Server Community. I want to build a research group around self-hosting. It's still a work in progress.

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 dealy easily with REST APIs.

Eyes Doodle

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Past projects

Hacker Events: Hacker Events was a small website that listed most important upcoming events. An ical feed is available too. It had several contributions but not many people were using it, so I stopped it.
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.
Konnectors: Konnectors is an application for Cozy. It allows to fetch and store data from many vendors automatically (Jawbone, Withings, phone providers, etc.). 25 people contributed to the code.
KYou: KYou is an application for Cozy. It allows to extract analytics from your personal data. It comes with a comparator tool that helps you find relations between your data.
Newebe: Newebe is a distributed social network. Every user host their account. It allows social interaction without compromising your privacy. One day I expect to turn it into a Cozy app.
Beburlesque: Beburlesque was a webzine about Burlesque culture. We published monthly interviews, news, picture galleries, events... We made a book from it too. We sold 2000 copies.