About Me

Who am I ? #

Born at the end of 1997, I have lived all my life in the Paris suburbs. Since I was little, I have always been immersed in the world of computers and technology in general. I still remember our old computer under Windows 98 not far from our Super Nintendo when I was around 4 years old.

Quite naturally, this attraction to these areas has persisted to the present. I always tried to understand as much as possible the things I was using. Sometimes even modifying them. I was really into tweaking video game consoles, whether it was software or even hardware since the GameCube.

In addition, at the same time, I started to write my first lines of code by myself when I was in high school. It was really very basic stuff like:

• A website with HTML and CSS (which I don’t really consider as code)
• Editing Minecraft game code to add new blocks by inheriting existing classes. So in Java but everyone makes mistakes right? 😳 (I was 14 years old, young and innocent…)

Academic Background #

High School #

My school career was not the easiest. I never liked school. I find the French school system really bad. Not because of what we are taught, but more because of the way we are taught… By this, I never made any effort until my higher education, which resulted in more than average grades.

However, in my last year of high school, I have been able to take the Computer Science option where I got the best grade possible (which strangely contrasted with all my other grades at this time). This is where I started to really code. The structure of the course was really nice, a lot of independence and freedom on the tasks to do. It was a real change from other courses that were too academic for anything. That’s where I started to learn C and Python. With my group, we developed a Space Invaders game in C with the SDL lib, that was a good first experience.

Higher Education #

First step in the world of higher education #

For my graduate studies, I was initially in a program of mathematics and computer science applied to the humanities and social sciences. Particular experience, very good grades in computer science, very bad in marketing. This is where I realized that I was a science guy. Marketing and communications is one of the things I hate most in life. Giving a fake image of something to trick people, I’m not into that and will never understand how you can love that.

License #

Now I’m going to talk about the university program that I followed in order to obtain my Bachelor’s degree with high honors: The Computer Science License of Paris 8 University.

I had the chance to study there for 3 great years. I owe a lot of my computer knowledge to this education and to the teachers who taught there. I recommend this place for all computer enthusiasts and people who like to code. I coded and learned a lot. Moreover, it is also here that I was introduced to open source software and its philosophy.

Here is a small list of what I learned there:

• Use a Linux based system, understand how it works and its many advantages. (How could you code without a Unix-like system? 😳)
• Advanced algorithms in a general way like Dijkstra, Tries, Compressions algorithmes…
• AI basics things like K-Means, MinMax, NN…
• Concurrent programming.
• Graphic programming with OpenGL.
• Networking programming.
• That C++ is the most powerful language (it starts to change with the expansion of Rust).
• That using \(\LaTeX\) is a good thing (guess my thought about Microsoft Office…).
• A bunch of different languages.

SWERC: #

At this time I had the chance to participate in the SWERC - ICPC programming contest which is quite prestigious. We finished 69th by coming without a notebook and without preparation. In hindsight, if we had prepared in advance, we could have easily aimed for a place below 30th. 69th place in these conditions, not bad isn’t it?

Master #

Currently, I am in the ANDROIDE Master at Sorbonne University but I don’t take classes there anymore because I’m doing my end of study internship. Compared to my Bachelor’s degree, this Master’s degree is very theoretical.

I am studying different fields there:

• Operational Research using solver like CPlex or Gurobi
• Combinatorial Optimisation for NP-Hard problems
• AI, in particular Reinforcement Learning, Supervised Learning, Evolutionary Algorithms…
• Human-Machine Interface (How to model a user and adapt things to it?)

What I like in everyday life #

When I’m away from the keyboard, I keep myself busy in different ways:

• Being a huge music fan, I sometimes spend hours listening to music without doing anything else, just enjoying the sound. I also play guitar sometimes, as I’ve been playing for 10 years.

• Being quite sporty by nature, I also practiced running in order to prepare the half marathon of Paris.

• Enjoy playing video games (especially old ones).

• Hang out with my friends.

My Config #

❯ neofetch                                          
      /\         etienne@Noki 
     /  \        ------------ 
    /\   \       OS: Arch Linux x86_64 
   /      \      Kernel: 6.1.12-arch1-1 
  /   ,,   \     Uptime: 1 hour, 42 mins 
 /   |  |  -\    Packages: 916 (pacman) 
/_-''    ''-_\   Shell: zsh 5.9 
                 Resolution: 4384x2466 
                 DE: GNOME 43.3 
                 WM: Mutter 
                 WM Theme: Adwaita 
                 Theme: Adwaita [GTK2/3] 
                 Icons: mcmojave-cursors [GTK2/3] 
                 Terminal: kitty 
                 CPU: AMD Ryzen 5 5600X (12) @ 3.700GHz 
                 GPU: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060 Ti 
                 Memory: 8498MiB / 15901MiB 

List of my langages preferences #