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serard@dev00:~/cv

AB Croisière

Software Developer — 2007 – 2008 — Full-Time On-Site

AB Croisière is an online and phone selling company for cruise tickets, as well as train and plane tickets to get there and back. Hired to redesign and automate some big parts of the information system. The company was sold to Promovacances-Karavel.

Key Achievements

  • Redesign of the tariff and availability systems: created an internal pricing and availability model, with SOAP mappings to all major cruise companies (MSC, Costa Croisière, etc.) for automatic nightly updates. Overall redesign of database, BackOffice and the selling details and list pages on the Front-office
  • Use of XHR with a Google-crawlable front-end for better SEO and searchability
  • Managing dev & prod environments scripting setup of development computers and developer experience
  • Managing an IT farm of 50 lightweight clients using Microsoft Terminal Server

Added Value

This was my first "real" engineering job, and looking back it set the template for everything that followed:

  • Acquisition-grade work. AB Croisière was sold to Promovacances-Karavel — one of the major French travel groups at the time. The systems I redesigned were part of the company's operational backbone when that deal happened.
  • Built the integration layer with the entire cruise industry. Designing SOAP mappings to MSC, Costa Croisière and other major operators meant reverse-engineering each provider's quirks, normalising them into a single internal pricing/availability model, and automating nightly synchronisation. Once it ran, the sales team simply trusted the data — no more manual updates.
  • A unified pricing & availability model. Before the redesign, tariffs and availability lived in scattered, inconsistent places. After, there was one canonical model that the BackOffice, the Front-office and the SOAP integrations all spoke. That kind of consolidation is half of what "domain modelling" means in practice — and it was my first taste of DDD before I had a name for it.
  • SEO ahead of its time. Building an XHR-driven front-end that was also fully crawlable by Google in 2007–2008 was non-trivial. It required serving a parallel HTML representation that matched the dynamic UI — basically a manual server-side rendering pattern years before SSR frameworks made it routine.
  • Owning dev and prod environments. Scripting developer workstations, managing 50 lightweight clients on Microsoft Terminal Server, and bridging Windows and LAMP worlds — all on a single role. The "no silo" reflex started here.
  • First refactoring at scale. Tearing apart a complex database and reshaping its workflows without losing a single sale taught me to respect production data above all else. That lesson never wore off.

Tech Stack

Bash LAMP HTML JS SOAP WS Windows Terminal Server Windows Server .NET VB 6 SOAP Bridge Eclipse PDT

My Feeling

My first big job and very first refactoring of a very complex database and workflows. Everything I do today — domain modelling, integration design, developer experience, owning the full stack from dev box to production — started taking shape here.

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