Background

From controllers to systems.

One thread runs through all of it: I build things that have to hold up.

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A production line controller holds up when nobody is watching. A passive house holds up through winter without a boiler. An information system holds up when fifteen thousand people need it on a Monday morning. It is the same craft, and I learned it in that order.

The workshop first

I started with machines. A technical baccalaureate in mechanical engineering, automated systems option, then a two-year diploma in mechanical engineering and industrial automation at Institut Lemonnier in Caen. The second year came down to a real object: design, build and commission a custom automated machine for an automotive supplier, seven of us, with a budget and a deadline. That is where you learn that a correct drawing and a working machine are two different things.

In between, summers in production: programming industrial controllers, maintaining lines and doing electrical work at a dairy manufacturer in Normandy. Then two months at Renault Véhicules Industriels, writing software that talked to a controller. The bridge between computing and machinery was already the subject.

It stayed that way. My next specialisation was called ICSISA, French for the communication interface between computerised systems and automated systems. The name is ugly, the idea is not. Making two worlds talk when they do not share a vocabulary is still what I do, with language models now standing where the controllers used to be.

Germany, and the subject that never left me

Engineering degree in computer science and telecommunications networks at ESAIP in Angers, graduated third out of twenty-five. A year in Germany along the way, including a semester of study in Konstanz, and ten weeks in Liverpool for English.

My Diplomarbeit, six months in 2002, was at Porsche AG in Weissach, in the body research and development department. The subject: specifying a database on the corporate portal to capture know-how and make it available again at the right stages of the product lifecycle. Java, Oracle, three-tier architecture, and workshops run in German in front of engineers who knew exactly what they wanted.

Twenty-four years later, I spend my evenings building a system that does precisely that: capturing working context so it outlives the person who acquired it. I did not expect my graduation subject to become current again.

Before Porsche, two shorter German stints: analyst-programmer at a stainless steel manufacturer in Reichenau, where I shipped a quotation system end to end, from gathering requirements to training the users, then testing and documenting a satellite antenna management application at ND SatCom, part of EADS. And two weeks at Bosch near Paris, in the engine control unit design department: too short to call it experience, long enough to see how the embedded intelligence of a car gets made.

Twenty years inside an institution you cannot reform by decree

Since June 2003 I have worked in support of the information system of the French national health insurance, in Caen. A national system, internal users, external partners, and applications some of which are older than my degree.

My role is information system support specialist, at level IVB, the highest in the official job framework. It used to be called lead technical support advisor; the classification changed, the work did not. In practice: mastering several domains of the information system, owning the complex cases, and acting as technical recourse for a wider team, for management and for partners.

What twenty years in that seat teach you is written in no specification. That the official procedure is sometimes wrong and everyone knows it. That a tool imposed without being understood will be worked around before the month is out. That an incident almost always has two causes, one technical and one human, and the second one sets the delay. That an organisation has an immune system, and that it cannot tell a virus from a graft.

That is the part of my job artificial intelligence does not replace, and it is exactly the part its adoption depends on.

Where that leaves me

An AI demo that works eight times out of ten takes a weekend. Making it hold up in production takes months, and the missing reliability is almost never in the code: it is in the exceptions, the unwritten habits and the dirty data of one specific organisation. That is the last mile, and that is where I work.

This site is the test bench. What I build, what breaks, and the guard rail I put in afterwards so it does not break again, all of it is in the notes and the labs. What I build away from the screen is in builds.

In short

• 2003 to today: support of the national information system of the French health insurance, level IVB.
• 2002: Diplomarbeit at Porsche AG, body R&D, Weissach.
• 2002: engineering degree in computer science and telecommunications networks, ESAIP Angers.
• 2000 to 2001: development and testing in France and Germany, Oracle, PHP, Visual Basic.
• 1999: post-diploma in interfacing computerised and automated systems, Institut Lemonnier.
• 1998: diploma in mechanical engineering and industrial automation, Institut Lemonnier, Caen.
• Languages: fluent English, TOEIC 895. German read and understood, a year on site, no practice since.

The verifiable detail is on LinkedIn, my public code on GitHub. The rest, the part that has nothing to do with a CV, is beyond. And if you were looking for a different Guillaume Couillard, this page will point you the right way.