Hello and welcome to this section of my personal website with a slighty altered first sentence compared to the one on the homepage. My name is Simon, you may also encounter me as Fergus, FergusL or just xulepth.

I work with computers and electronics. I started learning programming while in high school and my interest in writing code has never stopped growing since and is now the field I work in.

I work as a freelance developer, mainly on websites, making public-facing pages or working on the backend. I also engineer systems and softwares for embedded electronics and computers, either for interactive art installations, musical instruments or other situations requiring embedded processing.
In 2014, I took part in founding Trublion, an artists + engineers collective based in Paris that works with luthiers, artists and musical performers to create custom instruments, interfaces or devices that augment the possibilities of existing instruments. Trublion also gave birth or accompanied most of my musical projects that needed to incorporate technology.

Background

I have studied cinema, specifically as a camera operator and director of photography. I then switched to studying computer music and obtained a master’s degree. The topic of my master’s thesis was “Methodologies for new musical instrument design”, it focused on using improvisation and imagination as core element for designing new instruments and interfaces for making music. It’s written in french but if you’re interested you may contact me if you want to receive a digital copy.

On the computer side of things, I started with the scripting language Python, learning this language really got me interested — I wanted to dig more. Creative/art coding was something also interesting to me, I then learnt Processing and eventually learnt a bit of C and C++ on my way to writing software using OpenFrameworks.
At that point I had already started hacking on electronics and hardware using Arduino and, later, more advanced and lower level hardware platforms which meant I did a lot of C on the way! In 2014 I was introduced to Golang, a modern programming language born at Google focusing on features that our shiny new and powerful computers allow us to do. Golang or go for short has since become my primary programming language.
Another category of programming languages are those for creating music which is very much the perfect junction of my passions. I’ve spent a susbtantial amount of time working with Pure Data to create new instruments, interfaces or experiment with the digital approach to making sound and occasionally what one would consider music.
All the while I also learnt how to make cool websites, like this one, using a trio of languages known as HTML/CSS/Javascript, and that makes me a proud (!?) full stack developer.

My programming experience results from various combinations of the technologies and languages described above, this includes designing and building websites, bridging online social interactions with live video broadcasts, lower level system programming using musical information, database management, peer-to-peer applications leveraging new features in web browsers for a better, decentralized Internet or art installations generating music from environmental data.

I am also a musician, I received music theory and drums training at music school, I always had keyboards and string instruments lying around me as far as I can remember and finally again I spend a lot of time working on music using computers.