Anthony Ricaud

anthony@ricaud.me

I help web teams ship efficient products at a sustainable pace.

With 20 years of experience creating web products and a broad understanding of web protocols and browsers, I design efficient and fast web architectures.

A few things I value:

Work Experience

Web Architecture & Performance Consultant

, 2020 - Present

Helped teams achieve performance targets (such as Core Web Vitals) by setting up real-user monitoring, identifying critical pages, analysing and optimising those pages, training staff, reaching out to third parties on particular issues, planning the work.

Advised technology choices with performance and team efficiency in mind. Planned migrations to deliver most of the value quickly.

Some of the projects I've worked with: Cdiscount, HelloWork, JobiJoba, MaFormation, addons.mozilla.org, beta.gouv.fr.

I MAKE

, 2019 - 2020

CTO & Co-founder of a marketplace to buy DIY supplies

  • Architected and implemented the first version of the website that helped us raise 1.5M€.

arm

, 2018 - 2019

Team lead.

  • Improved the team velocity by promoting feature flags, more frequent deploys, planning ahead of implementations and documentation of common manual tasks. This led to the uneventful release of five projects in the same week.
  • Re-architected the documentation generation in close collaboration with the Tech Writers. Generating documentation became faster, more reliable, gave better feedback to the writers and saved our team a lot of time operating it.

A Little Market / Etsy

, 2017

Senior Full Stack Engineer and project manager.

  • Simplified sign-in flow to require less information.
  • Coordinated efforts to close the platform. With a tight deadline, we had to close features and create a shop migration tool. I managed the project on the engineering side, stayed in sync with our support and communications teams, tested the migration tool with users before release.
  • Mentored other developers in unit testing and learning JavaScript.

The Food Assembly

, 2015 - 2016

Lead engineer and manager for 5 engineers.

  • Focused engineering efforts towards business value rather than perfect code.
  • Helped the team increase the quality and performance of the features shipped (through systemic automated tests, database query analysis).
  • Designed a fallback version of the website to handle high-traffic during events like TV reports.
  • Designed the architecture changes to enable a quick turnaround by the team on an end-of-year alteration of our business model.
  • Highly involved with designers and product managers to refine projects and turn them into actionable and well-scoped projects.

Mozilla

, 2010 - 2015

BuddyUp

A FirefoxOS app for collaborative user support.

  • Lead developer for a team of three.
  • Gave feedback to the FirefoxOS team on tools for app developers.
  • Created and edited the demo video for the 1.0 version.

FirefoxOS

I was part of the Gaia team that implemented the user-facing apps.

  • Participated in the run to 1.0 release. This project was a big challenge as the first mobile OS to only use web technologies. On top of that, we shipped on very constrained hardware and with tight deadlines.
  • Technical owner of the Dialer app. We implemented phone related features such as Dual SIM, MMI, Emergency contacts.
  • Created wireframes and prototypes for new ideas.
  • Iterated with design and product teams to implement new features.
  • Improved the performance of the Settings app (startup, panel transitions).
  • Built a framework for measuring startup performance of apps and user scenarios.
  • Maintained project quality through linting and sheriffing.
  • Researched performance impact of SVG images compared to static images and icon fonts.

Mozilla.org

Lead developer

  • Multi locale website, serving 10 million pages a day in 90 languages.
  • Transitioned the codebase from PHP to Python.
  • Supported legacy browsers while keeping a modern look.
  • Implemented marketing campaigns for specific Firefox versions or Mozilla events.

Evangelism team

  • Created demos for new technologies (WebSockets, WebForms, History API).
  • Maintained a list of new features for Firefox 4.
  • Reported bugs and followed progress on new features.
  • Gave several presentations on those new features.
  • Followed other browsers implementations of upcoming web standards.

Liberation

, March 2010

Contracted to implement a newspaper reader in HTML to replace a Flash version.

Skyrock.com

, 2007 - 2010

I worked on back-end development as part of the platform architecture team. I worked closely with network/system administrators to find solutions to improve performance and availability of the platform.

  • 7th largest social network, European leader with over 21 million visitors.
  • Developed a mechanism to dynamically switch between databases.
  • Developed the friend section, the gift section, improved the profile section.
  • Developer and technical consultant for front-end development. Dynamic user interfaces. Specific developments for commercial campaigns. No JS libraries used.
  • Mentored junior developers.
  • Co-designed a developer workflow (based on Trac and SVN) as the engineering group grew in size.

Community experience

WebKit contributor

, 2008 - 2010
  • Filed bugs and enhancements. Summarized new features.
  • Patches for the Web Inspector : bug fixes, filtering resources, search improvements.

Writing

Public speaker

Other

I regularly file actionable bug reports for browser engines (Blink, Gecko, WebKit). I've fixed some myself.

Contributions to various open source projects:

Education

2004-2007. Bordeaux Graduate School of Engineering, specializing in Computer Science
Masterʼs Degree of Engineering at a level equivalent to 5 years of higher education. Ecole Nationale Superieure dʼElectronique Informatique et Radiocommunication de Bordeaux, Bordeaux (France)
2002-2004
A 2 year intensive sciences course in preparation to the selective entrance examination to French engineering schools. Lycee Jean Perrin, Lyon (France)
2002
Baccalauréat S, equivalent to a High school Diploma in sciences. Lycée Laure Gatet, Périgueux (France)

Languages

  • French, native language
  • English, fluent, used daily at Mozilla and arm
  • Spanish, some notions