I'm Thomas

I code user interfaces for humans.

Photo of me

I am a freelance front-end developer focusing on user interfaces. I have 8 years of experience and live by the sea in Brittany, France.

If you have trouble making your websites and apps responsive, fast, accessible, or visually cohesive, I'm the right person for the job.

  • HTML Logo
  • CSS Logo
  • JavaScript Logo
  • SVG Logo
  • Svelte Logo
  • VueJs Logo
  • Web Components Logo
  • Tailwind CSS Logo
  • AWS Logo
  • Kirby CMS Logo

Freelance Works

Screen capture of the website mensfashioner

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.

Screen capture of the website IMEC

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.

Screen capture of a live show by Gauthier Andres

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.

Screen capture of the website Bas Gros Poing

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

Rethinking the engineering and processes of interface creation at Arkea

Photo of me

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.

Read the full deep dive.

Printed letters, smart emails and modern blog stacks at Compte CO2

Photo of me

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.

Read the full deep dive.

Résumé

Experience

FRONTEND ENGINEER, Iguana Solutions, 2021-2024
  • Development of a Single Page Application (SPA), for an in-house startup project.
  • Stack selection and implementation: Svelte, Sveltekit, Typescript, Tailwind CSS, CUBE CSS Methodology
  • UI and UX counselling, UI integration with HTML/CSS/JS in Svelte components
  • Development of custom libraries to interface with AWS services: login with Amplify/Cognito, tracing with Xray, etc.
  • Engineering of the state and data flow of the application using Svelte stores (writable/derived, unidirectionnal data flow)
  • Development of an interactive diagram system (edit, drag and drop, zoom)
DESIGN ENGINEER, Arkéa Banking Group, 2018-2021
  • Development of a design system of reusable, accessible, native components that can be used in any JavaScript framework as custom elements.
  • Technical advisor to product owners, designers and marketing.
  • Lead Developer on a complete visual overhaul of an existing banking solution, spread over three technical stacks (Java JSP, Angularjs, VueJS) using the customer's graphic charter.
FULL STACK DEVELOPER, Compte CO2, 2018
  • Development of React components, used via Gatsby, GraphQL and a Wordpress backend.
  • Visual redesign and development of email templates, progressive degradation testing.
  • Creation of a PDF document generator with Puppeteer, using Node JS, Express and MongoDB.
  • Organization and reworking of graphic standards, creation of visual aids.
FRONT-END DEVELOPER, Id3i Agency, 2016 - 2018
  • Development of responsive websites from templates using HTML, CSS and Jquery.
  • Ongoing development of the company's CMS, audits with customers.
  • Prototyping and design of desktop and mobile applications.

Education

2019 - In-house courses - Apside Academy
3 days each: VueJS, Angular 8, Typescript.
2015 - Bachelor Professional degree - University of Caen
Web development cursus, 9-month training course, 3-month internship.
2009 - Bachelor of Arts and Media - Caen School of Fine Arts
Communication cursus, 4-years.

Skills & tech stacks

Language
  • English: Experienced (C2 level)
  • Spanish: notions
Frontend
  • JavaScript: Svelte, Sveltekit, Vue, React
  • CSS: Tailwind, Bootstrap
  • HTML: accessibility, web components
Others
  • Programming: notions in Python, GO, Bash for personal projects
  • User Experience: basic knowledge, respect of HTML guidelines
  • Web Design: experienced at expanding an existing design, fixing a lack of cohesion, and design systems

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.

Get in touch

Want to work with me? Just send me an email at contact @ thomasorus.com and I'll answer back quickly!