Olivier Bacs

The DevX squad is the enablement centre that develop productivity, security solutions and applications that fall outside of the standard squad model, and is born to support engineering in the midst of the Economist’s transformative journey towards technical maturity and innovation. This involves DevSecOps focused projects looking after our cloud estate and promoting engineering excellence, from log retention management, ownership of the companywide tech radar, to re-platforming risky apps and building a series of tools to automatically manage the audit of the code.

• Helped relaunch our DevSecOps community of practice meetings
• Worked on replatforming subscription.economist.com
• Part of the team that built the new data platform backing the customer analytics data solution at the Economist
• Worked on internal tools used daily by engineers

• Worked on the planned relaunch of subscription.economist.com
• Worked on marketing tools for the CASE project

One of the top independent Birmingham based software engineering agencies. Supplier of the Financial Times, Ettinger, Ovo, Ecotricity, et al

• Part of a prestigious and forward thinking environment involving a large and multi-disciplinary product team based in Birmingham (Bluetel), London (Financial Times) and Tokyo (Nikkei), as well as newsrooms in Asia and in New York.
• Built bespoke systems and tools solving the particular problems and workflows of a distributed newsroom
• On-call support of the the applications
• Lead post-mortems
• Helped built its deployment pipeline
• Exercised an excellent team workflow, with in-depth code reviews, automated/functional testing and frequent retrospectives with our enterprise level clients.
• Used both Scrum and Kanban working methodologies
• Delivered new front-end and, later, CMS as part of the engineering team
• Key player in the Paywall project
• Lead the new, more efficient image acquisition workflow
• Expanded tools tackling problems facing the newsroom and everyday customers

As part of the team, I was highly engaged in projects scoping and planning I was writing the app - built on top of a Java SOA - of the SaaS replacement of a library management desktop software used by a third of all public and academic libraries in the UK. I joined the business at a pivotal moment where the sunset date of the predecessor was announced, the replacement was unfinished and customers were struggling to understand the need for a completely rethought app.

• Worked with a high calibre team, focused on delivering a service orientated architecture for Soprano, promoting test driven development and best practices.
• Worked on an app framework built from the ground up to accommodate highly customised services, which incorporated Symfony components through Composer and leveraging ideas borrowed from domain driven design.
• Capita Library’s classic Enterprise structure enabled me to work closely with the cloud infrastructure, web service, and business specialists' teams to extend features and advert crises of the offline first, mobile first application
• Assisted the implementation of a custom RESTful API used by a variety of client applications to encapsulate the business logic of a library management system.
• Arrived as a junior developer and gained the trust of a senior development team.
• Survived GDPR whilst working on a very user centric tool.

Approached internally to join the team to develop and maintain and improve glue scripts and services written in PHP, and act as second-line support for issues the technical team couldn’t solve.

• Turning data-entry heavy tasks into automated, trusted and efficient workloads handed by scripts.
• Taking part in server migrations to consolidate, secure and streamline the catalogue of solutions.
• Wrote white paper (HTML5 for ads), solution outlines and documentation for new and existing solutions
• Set up optimisation of our tools, based on usage data and user feedback.
• Set the bases of the error warning system.