I'm Thomas
I make user interfaces for humans.
I am a freelance product engineer focusing on user interfaces and customer satisfaction. I have 9 years of experience and I live by the sea in Brittany, France.
If you have trouble making your websites and apps easy to use, responsive, fast, accessible, or visually cohesive, I'm the right person for the job.
I transform designs and APIs into websites and applications. I bridge the gap between developers and designers when needed.
I have worked on many different stacks: pure SSR MVC frameworks using templates, design systems with Web Components, and Single Page Applications using JavaScript meta-frameworks.
What clients said about me
A mission that exceeded our expectations.
Thomas is a pleasure to work with, in terms of the quality of his communication, the quality of his code, his recommendations and his ability to adapt to any situation. He was able to deliver quality work on time, and even stepped out of his comfort zone to help us with a Python subject. A true all-terrain developer!
He's an invaluable asset to any team lucky enough to work with him.
Excellent experience with Thomas, who worked on a mobile application project as UX/UI Designer.
His performance was exemplary from start to finish: he was able to establish flawless communication with the customer, instilling confidence and the design notions needed to understand the choices that had been made, while providing the developer with an impeccable mock-up, explicitly separating design tokens, components and screens.
I can't recommend Thomas highly enough, and can't wait to call on his services again.
Freelance Works
The Mens Fashioner crew hired me to help build their long-awaited men's lifestyle ressource, starting with the selection of the tech stack up to webdesign and the frontend development. My careful implementation of their design into tokens and components, combined with the strong wysiwyg editor of Kirby CMS, allowed them to compose a personal yet profesional looking website.
IMEC had just finished reworking their website with a freelancer and were unhappy with the result, which did not look cohesive and did not felt profesional. I reworked the entirety of the stylesheets, cleaned and standardized the templates and components, and reworked the accessibility.
When freelance journalist Gauthier Andres launched his daily talk show on youtube, he knew he had to diffuse it as a podcast. I built BOTOZ using Python, as a command line utility to transcode youtube videos into MP3 and XML files. BOTOZ is now a fully automated open source solution running in the background, and has served hundreds of episodes to thousands of listeners.
Bas Gros Poing is the longest running active website and podcast about fighting games in French language. Guillaume Brindon redesigned the website under my guidance, and I developped the whole frontend. The animations and design elements are inspired by arcade cabinets, character select screens, and the nineties esthetics.
Technical deep dives
Building a reusable frontend stack for Iguana Solutions
When I joined Iguana Solutions, the company had a several web projects in the pipeline, but little to no design and frontend development experience. I helped select a set of technologies and methodologies that would fit the company's culture and goals, while also learning a lot about builing Single Page Applications in the process.
Rethinking the engineering and processes of interface creation at Arkea
From 2018 to 2020 I joined the Arkea banking group as a UI engineer to help modernize the technical stack and processes. We moved from several intricate SASS codebases to a single library of components, flexible enough to support several designs and 100% WCAG compliant.
As this technical change restricted a very freeform design culture, I volunteered to participate in design meetings to help the designers, marketers and product owners understand how to work with a design system.
This team effort resulted in a sharp decline of interface, accessibility and responsive bugs. It reduced drastically the cost of making, delivering and testing user interfaces.
Printed letters, smart emails and modern blog stacks at Compte CO2
When I arrived at Compte CO2, the company was launching new products and needed a total revamp of all its frontend styles. With the help of a graphic designer we started a six month marathon, redoing everything from the main website to the blog, but also email templates and print styles for printed bank documents.
This short mission was a massive step forward in my career, as I was able to learn a lot about moderm JavaScript tooling and frameworks. I self-studied React and NodeJS before starting, and developed my first official component library for a client.
All those efforts resulted in a more cohesive vision for the company and a greater understanding of modern web development practices for me.
Selected writings about web development
Writing has been a big part of my personal and profesional life. Below are some articles or tutorials I wrote about web development.
- HTML Tips and tricks
- A massive and comprehensive guide about HTML good practices, going from accessibility and layout to specific elements, written to help friends improve their websites.
- CSS Methodologies through history
- A long form article detailing how good practices around CSS evolved with time, and how different people solve the same problem in very different ways.
- New CSS that can actually be used in 2024
- The amount of CSS novelty in the last two to four years has been staggering. Multiple innovations have been released and are now supported in all modern browsers, and some of them fundamentally change how to make websites.
- Questioning the JS frontend paradigm
- An ever growing list of links questioning the JavaScript paradigm.
Get in touch
Want to work with me? Just send me an email at pro @ thomasorus.com and I'll answer back quickly!