Software engineer at Capgemini, building Java applications for the French civil aviation authority (DGAC/DSNA). Air traffic management software where reliability isn't optional. Completing my Master's in Mobile & IoT at Ynov Campus Toulouse in parallel.
I'm a generalist (backend, scripting, mobile, DevOps), but infrastructure, automation, and security are where I spend my evenings. I like systems that run themselves, fail loudly, and don't leak.
My side projects start from small frustrations or ideas I can't shake. The domains drift: DNS and routing one weekend, home automation the next, a self-hosted LLM stack, encrypted file sync that survives cloud providers I'd rather not trust. Plus a habit of self-hosting things most people would hand to a SaaS.
Control matters to me more than speed. I'll spend three evenings on something most people patch in one, if it means it holds up and I'm not paying back the shortcut six months later. The challenge is doing that without over-engineering it.
Java services for safety-critical aviation software. I also ran, solo, the Oracle to PostgreSQL migration of a large critical production database. A tool handled the core conversion; the real work was around it: heavy SQL and shell debugging, validation, and making sure nothing broke and nothing was lost.
Most of what I build runs on open source, and the field has given me far more than I've returned so far. I care about knowledge sharing more broadly too: clean issue reports, public answers, writing the README I wish I'd found. Between school and work my contributions stay modest for now, mostly well-documented issues. The long arc is to become an active maintainer, ideally on a project I started myself. That's the version of this profile I'm working toward.
- LinkedIn: in/nicolas-delahaie
- Email: nico601.delahaie@gmail.com