A lot can be self taught, and unfortunately I haven’t had the chance to study coding at the university. My dad was also a self-taught programmer, and I admired that a lot when I was a kid.
So it was quite natural, when I could have access to the internet (I was 18 when we had our first internet connection at home), that I started learning how to code.
The way I did was a bit peculiar: before having access to the internet, I loved creativity softwares to produce my own music and drawings. Spent a lot of time on things like Cubase and Photoshop.
When I started learning in a management school and this school didn’t have yet a website (this was 1997), I joined a team of 10 students who had created a student club called “Webside” and whose first mission was to create the school’s website.
Because I had these photoshop skills, I helped working on the design and illustration of the website. And while doing so, I was in contact with other students and an external consultant who were already good at building HTML websites. So that’s how I learned HTML, by following the examples of these students, learning from them. Kind of knowledge exchange.
At the end of the year, it was time to find a new team to lead the computer student club and I’ve got chosen to become its president. This was 1998 and we helped a few companies from our city building their first websites.
I had a big passion for animation and graphics, and back in the days, the most beautiful online projects were using something called Macromedia Flash, which is quite close to what you can do nowadays with Adobe After Effect. Learning how to make interactive animations was fantastic and helped me be more creative.
In 1999, my management school assigned me to a one week intensive course about China. At the end of it, we had to deliver some kind of presentation, but without any format specified. With a classmate, we decided to deliver a flash presentation of the history and geography of China, through timelines and Venn diagrams. Registered a domain name for this, toutelachine.com and delivered to the main teacher of the class our presentation in the form of… a post it with the URL of the website created for it. It got a very review, and I decided to submit it for a national competition of the best websites of the year called “Clics d’Or”. This was normally a competition for the best web and advertising agencies, but there was a category for beginners, where the public could vote, in partnership with some big brands like RTL and RATP.
To my surprise, I won the “golden award, public prize” for that year. “Clics d’Or, Grand Prix du Public 2000.
I was still a student, actually making an internship for audit firm Deloitte in Belgium and travelled back to Paris for the awards ceremony in the Louvre. During that event, I met the founder of a real estate software editor who had successfully digitized his company to become the #2 best internet portal for real estate classifieds. He liked my project about China, we kept in touch, but found we had nothing we could do together.
While purchasing the domain name about China, I also tried to buy a few other domains, and discovered that the domain name trombi.com was free. It was quite natural for me to look for this name as the word Trombi is quite literally the french translation of the english word “Facebook”. Trombi was a printed offline directory of students with their picture, home address and a list of what they love and what they don’t. I was helping the team in charge of editing and printing this book. I could really notice how often this book was used, every student had it. At every home party, we would have a look at it and it was of great help to remember who is who in a school of more than 2000 students.
I thought about all the problems we had with the printed version of this service. You had to wait many months after the year starts to receive it, couldn’t be updated when you moved to another address or changed phone number, very few were sharing their email address.
So when I saw that Trombi.com domain name was available, I thought that it could be a good idea to build such an online face book for my management school.
Only problem was that I knew how to code HTML static pages, but I didn’t know how to create a database, have a form on a website, make dynamic pages that render the results of what has been added to this database.
So I went online on some IRC chats, talked with some programmers and found one who was willing to exchange his knowledge of how to create a form, a database, and a list result, in exchange with my knowledge of how to do interactive animations with Macromedia Flash.
My school was in Reims, I took a train to Paris to meet that guy and we spent a whole weekend exchanging knowledge.
It was a very basic coding idea, but for a MVP (minimum viable product) or at least a proof of concept, that would be enough.
The concept was to integrate on html page a form with a CGI script. Once the form is submitted, the script takes the data entered by the user, and adds a new line to a text file, with each value separated by a coma.
Then, I had another html page, where I would “read” this txt list, parse the data, and display a list of all the students who had registered.
That’s it. You couldn’t modify your data once submitted, you couldn’t choose your school. It was just one simple form and one simple list of results, both connected to this text file.
Then, I printed small flyers with the URL of the website, and saying “trombi.com, online student directory”. I didn’t have any money so the school administration helped me a bit and I left one flyer in each student mail box. I also “wallpapered” some walls of the campus with the same simple message.
And then, magic happened. Every day, I could see dozens of students register. First, my closest friends and classmates, then, people I didn’t know at all. It was amazing to be able to talk every day with friends who were using this very simple website, and then step by step improve it.
The first thing I did was add more schools related to my own school. Each school had a separate page, a separate text file, no search or edit was possible, it stayed very basic.