Jérôme CREMOUX
Self-taught, for the love of it.
From a store repair counter to the space industry.
I'm Jérôme CREMOUX, 44, a French developer. Unlike many in this field, I hold no degree: no engineering school, no university. I fell in love with code as a kid, and I've never stopped since. Everything I know comes from open source, from personal projects, and from years of learning on the job: building, taking old devices apart to understand how they work, figuring out how to make them work differently, and learning from other people's code.
You could say my path hasn't been a straight line. I spent five years behind the service counter of a store, fixing customers' computers and coding at night out of passion, until a short career change finally let me make it my job. Then six years at a small software company, where I went from developer to lead developer on mobile, web and backend. A stint as a consultant, and today I'm the technical lead on a 3D visualization software for the space industry. From a store repair counter to the space industry, self-taught: even today, I still can hardly believe it.
I love creating. What keeps me going is curiosity, and it refuses to stay in a single field. UX and graphic design matter to me as much as code. I model in 3D. I love software architecture and things that are clean, square, well made. Most of all, I can't let go of a problem until I've answered the two questions that count: why, and how.
Open source is what shaped me as a developer, so working for it today is my way of giving back what I received. But it's more than gratitude: I believe open source is the last independent space we have left, the only real counterweight to the handful of giant platforms that decide what our digital lives look like. I want my work to strengthen that space, not feed the other one.
That's what Helios and Helios Forecast mean to me: my contribution. Free tools, built in full transparency, that help everyone see and understand their energy. To me, technology shouldn't lock people in: it should hand them back control. And if I can spend the rest of my career on this side of the fence, trying to leave the world a little better than I found it, I'll consider it time well spent.
Helios is free. A coffee keeps it alive.
Helios and Helios Forecast are free and open source, built in my spare time, which often spills over into the night. If they're useful to you, a coffee is the nicest way to say thanks, and it's very concretely what lets me keep going.