User:Ywarnier

From Dokeos

My name is Yannick Warnier. I am in my late twenties now (born in Belgium in 1979). I am currently analyst-programmer for the Dokeos Company and it is my main occupation because I love the project, because I can give my full potential in it, and because I am paid for it ;-) (some parts of my work are still voluntary though).

1 History

History

I started technical support for a Dokeos (company) client in April 2004. As I felt attracted to the project, had no other contract at that time (being self-empoyed) and the company needed development staff, I jumped aboard the Dokeos company team, first as a bug-fixer, then very soon as a provider of services for Dokeos clients (improvements aimed at particular clients that could later be imported into Dokeos).

Late in August 2004, I started the "migration projects", helping interested companies to get their courses into Dokeos (from all kind of sources).

In early 2005, I passed a certification exam which gives me the title of Zend Certified PHP Engineer. In 2007, I confirmed that by passing the PHP5 Engineer certification. It is mostly because I think people around the world need to have a way to measure the level of PHP programmers (for employment matters) and I wanted to encourage the initiative.

In mid-2005, I stupidly (because it didn't need any special brains) launched the "plugin" feature in Dokeos, which has apparently since then got a great popularity (the feature was easy to make available but apparently nobody had thaught about it). This has since then been transcended by the tools list for a course being available in a database table. You can thus add a new tool to all courses very easily now.

I also started the integration of a full-text search tool, which will remain a service provided by the Dokeos company because of the difficulties to accurately set it up (loooooads of parameters depending on the languages, frequency of updates and permissions given to users of the search tool). If time allows, this will be made much smarter later on and will in the end be available as a Dokeos extension. The search engine used is MnoGoSearch and is not written in PHP, so it needs an installation distinct to Dokeos.

Late 2005, I started the SCORM tool redesign (because the first version had been designed very quickly, and had some flaws, although it worked already for a lot of contents and gave me a great base to work on).

October 2006, test tool redesign (relatively quick development) to linearise tests creation.

Apparently, I am now lead developer for the Dokeos company, which I like a lot, so I feel much more responsible for much more developments than just my own.

CV

See my CV on the Dokeos website: CV. A bit out of date, as any CV.

Hobbies

I love languages (including programming languages), strategical computer games and outside activities when they're great and they don't cost too much (I hate spending a lot of money on something because there is so much you can do on your own). I love sci-fi, medieval-fantastic and surrealistic movies and mangas. I used to play guitar, drums, keyboard and sing in several bands (which I usually brought together in the first place) but I'm not really talented, I just like it (I still play when I have some time left).

I like living abroad for periods of 6 months to 2 years. So far I've come to the UK (since 2003) and intend to go to Peru for 6 months soon, and then to Danemark. Potentially to New Zealand and South Africa as well (no precise plans yet) if they manage to sort out their internet connexions so that I can continue working on Dokeos.