Q&A with Yohann Richard, Principal Software Engineer, Audere
Tell me a little bit about your background and what led you to work at Audere.
I am French, I’ve spent most of my life in a city called Angers, where I grew up, spending most of my vacations on my grandparents’ farm nearby.
I was lucky enough to be offered a MSX computer by my step-dad when I was about nine years old. It had no floppy disk or hard drive, but it had a BASIC language interpreter, and a book full of video game programs to type in. Those were buggy, so I had to figure out how to fix them if I wanted to play, and those were my first steps into coding. I've been hooked ever since!
After my Master’s, I came to the USA in 2000 via an internship for a company called Business Objects, which later converted into a full time job. I’ve spent most of my time in Silicon Valley, where my son was born, but we traveled all over the place.
Business Objects was later acquired by SAP, and during my time there I learned a lot about building User Interfaces, and practiced mostly JavaScript and Java. I started a small company on the side with a friend to build a browser plugin to support people playing Fantasy Sports, which eventually got acquired by Fantasy Pros.
During that time I was able to land a job at Facebook, in 2009, where I joined the User Interface Engineering team. It was extremely thrilling to be part of that adventure early on, before the company became the giant corporation it is today. Eventually I led the Web front-end for the News Feed product, then switched to join the React organization, where my team helped rebuild the whole platform in React, which launched in 2019 when I left.
In your own words, what are your core responsibilities/roles that you manage/do at Audere?
I am managing the front-end team here at Audere, but I am also spending quite some time coding. The team is composed of senior developers, veterans of the industry, and more junior developers that I coach and help grow in their early career.
I work with our excellent teams of PMs, designers, and machine learning and infrastructure engineers in order to deliver applications that facilitate studies in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) and to improve the administration of rapid diagnostic tests (RDTs)
One of our ongoing goals is to build a platform allowing us to rapidly turn out such products, so that we can quickly support the many partners willing to work with us.
What does your typical workday look like?
I typically start my day with a daily check-in with my team, followed by a few meetings — usually planning sessions, bug bash, recruiting events, or 1:1s. The rest of my day is dedicated to programming.
What is your Why?
When the pandemic started, I was yearning for an opportunity to have an impact on global health. Audere’s CEO posted in an engineering group I belong to, asking if anyone was interested in helping his company improve the quality of interpretations for RDTs. I talked with him, joined first as a contractor, then as full time engineer before being asked to lead the front-end team. I am very excited by the potential Audere can have in improving health in LMICs.
What is the most exciting project you've worked on at Audere?
I was lucky enough to participate in several projects at Audere that were really interesting, but my favorite one is the ongoing platformization of our code. Prior to this, the engineers were copying over their latest existing application as the basis for the next one, which would turn out to be complicated in terms of support. We switched to build an API containing as much reusable front-end code as possible, for both our UI components and business logic. This, coupled with a set of scripts, allows us to speed up the process to bring up a new application to life. It also increases our quality, as fixes in the API are now immediately propagated to all of the applications using it.
What is your fav thing about working at Audere?
We’ve built a very strong team at Audere, as our hiring bar is pretty high, and it’s a pleasure to work with people so driven and talented in such a small company.
I really like that our whole company is geared towards a common goal. Large companies tend to have each team with their own set of goals, which might not always make it easy for transversal collaborations. At Audere, there’s no such thing, as we all aim toward the same target, and this simplifies cross team collaboration a lot.
How do you spend your off-work hours?
I usually spend time either working out, walking my dog, or playing board games/video games.
My son is playing saxophone at his college’s marching band in LA, so hopefully, I’ll be able to spend a few weekends there to see him play this year!
Any new hobbies during the pandemic?
I’ve bought a 3D printer and started tinkering with it. I 3D printed and painted a full board and set of pieces for the game “Settlers of Catan”. It was a lot of fun.
Share three facts that your colleagues would be surprised to learn about you.
As a teen, I wanted to be a cartoonist.
I got trained to be a “Body Combat” instructor (not an actual martial art).
I barely spoke English when I came to the USA.
Most used skill in your role at Audere?
Debugging weird bugs in React.
Keurig or drip coffee?
Nespresso
If you could have a super-power what would it be?
Cooking potatoes by just looking at them.
