Who am I ?

Passionate about the world of development since I was a kid, I was not even 10 years old when I saw my father writing VBA macros in Excel… Who would have thought that my whole career started from Excel… I still have nightmares about it at night!

I soon came across Dreamweaver (for those who remember), and I found it incredible to be able to produce pages that would display in a browser, or even everyone’s browsers once they were published. I would play with the software over and over again, then try to recreate those pages in code only, without the GUI.

When I was 12-13 years old, I was part of an airsoft association (a sport that is neither for children, nor for adults who have lost their childish soul, where you play soldier with too expensive equipment and shoot each other with tiny plastic bullets) and we were missing a website to complete the association. It was the perfect opportunity! No sooner said than done, I had given myself body and soul to produce the website of the association.

Not knowing at the time how databases work, I had created my own CMS system in PHP with a back-office creating XML files that were read by the front-office. Today I talk about it with a mixture of smile and humor, but at the time I was so proud of it! It is this feeling that pushed me to make my career out of it, this 21st century blacksmith side, to create with my 10 fingers websites and web applications that will be useful to thousands or even millions of users (depending on the project).

My career

2010 - 2012 : Pictet

I started my career as a Web developer through the back door, with a 2-year internship at the Pictet bank, where I discovered the world of Java Web development. The learning curve was steep, but if I didn’t like the language, I liked what I was doing.

Working on both the website and the intranet, I was able to discover the world of in-house development, where customers are also colleagues.

2012 - 2015 : Freelancer

While I continued my studies in web development, I started working as a freelancer. So I started my own agency as a sole proprietor: Michael Barbey Web Development (yes I know, very inspired for the name 😅).

This work being in parallel with my studies, I had little time to prospect for clients and projects, and even less to realize them afterwards. I worked here and there on small interventions, but it had already allowed me to discover my aversion to play the commercial and prospecting customers …

It is only after my studies that I dedicated myself more seriously to this work, but still with a backup plan just in case. Indeed, during my studies, I had done a small internship at Netinfluence, a small agency of 5 people at the time. So I took advantage of it to get a part-time job with them. This way, I can devote half of my time to get my own agency off the ground, and if not every month is profitable, I still have a minimum monthly income with this second job.

As a freelancer, I’ve finally been able to immerse myself in all aspects of web projects. Starting with the canvassing of clients, then the UX and UI workshops, followed by the front-end and back-end development phases, client feedback, deliveries, maintenance, servers, and accounting.

2014 - 2015 : Netinfluence

As explained before, in parallel to my job as a freelance developer, I also had a job at Netinfluence. It also allowed me to alternate between projects where I was doing absolutely everything, and team projects, where everyone had their own role. I also discovered the joy of having someone dedicated to prospecting, and a project manager placed between customers and employees, as well as development on the Symfony framework 😍 (which I still haven’t dropped as I write these lines).

2015 - now : SQLI Switzerland

I then left my 2 jobs to work full time in the agency part of the company SQLI Switzerland (the agency was called WAX at the time). While the SQLI group is a large company with more than 2'500 employees established in several countries, the “agency” division of the “Swiss” subsidiary was only composed of about ten people at the time.

There, I took on projects that were always more interesting, always more technically complicated, and always more rewarding, all without having to manage clients and contracts myself 😁. I started in 2015 as a junior PHP developer, we were 2 developers in the division and we were releasing 30 days/man wordpress projects one after another. Then, one thing led to another, the years passed, the team drastically grew, the projects seriously increased in size and complexity, to the point that it feels like a different company! We deliver projects of several thousands days/man and Wordpress is a myth that I haven’t seen in a very… very long time.

Today

Now as a lead tech, I specialize in PHP Symfony and NodeJS development, developers management, as well as everything that revolves around code quality, testing, performance, Docker, DevOps, servers, and automation in general.

Always looking for new technical challenges to take on, I continue to specialize in ever more technical, cutting edge, and ever more away from the customers 😆.