About

Who I am

Mr.Nice is a nickname from friends, former colleagues and family — a pun on Gentils, my surname, which happens to mean "kind" in French.

Versatile technical lead, based in Rouen, Normandy. Assignments carried out in Germany, the United Arab Emirates, Spain, the Netherlands, Scotland, Portugal, and beyond.

My approach

A system, whether AV or web, should be simple, robust, efficient, modifiable, and understandable by someone other than me — never dependent on a single person to work. It is not always achievable at 100 %, but it is the direction I take on every project.

That method — understand, simplify, make it reliable — applies just as well to IT as to R&D, prototyping or day-to-day technical logistics. That is what explains the versatility: same method, different fields.

It goes for communication too: an email that gets to the point, the essentials in the first lines rather than buried in context. Nothing against opening with a hello — what matters is the BLUF method (Bottom Line Up Front): the request or the expected action comes right after, not at the end. The details are in a note.

What matters

• Sobriety: fewer elements, better chosen.
• Performance: fast by default, not by last-minute optimisation.
• Autonomy: own your stack instead of enduring it.
• Clarity: systems and interfaces that explain themselves.
• Kindness: explain without implying you should have known already.
• Reliability: a project handed over is a project seen through.
• Punctuality: on time, including when the site schedule slips.
• Resourcefulness: find a solution with whatever is on site.

Background

A career change from post-production towards event AV and digital signage — driven by the urge to keep learning and to deal with different technical constraints on every project.

Into computing since secondary school: community and personal projects, and continuous technical watch ever since.

Ran the IT and network of a former company single-handedly: servers, NAS, VPN, telephony.

More recently: amateur radio, a logical follow-on from an early interest in aviation (BIA, the French introductory aeronautics certificate).

Most of the projects I run are bespoke, with one constant requirement: the tech must never show. It blends into the furniture, the set, the space. The best possible feedback on an install is that nobody noticed it — which makes portfolio photos genuinely awkward.

Before all that, rugby: started in a small Normandy club, moved up to regional level, then to Nantes with Stade Nantais / SNUC, playing number 8, until I was 18, with several departmental, regional and national selections along the way. I stopped to protect my knees and shoulders, but it was a real school of life: team spirit, commitment, respect for the opponent — values that still shape the way I work.