Passionate about application development, I love experimenting new technologies. I also enjoy designing and creating user interfaces, always giving much credit to sites and applications with a polished UI/UX.
Thanks to my experience gained in the industry, as well as through my various personal projects, I have a good command of Laravel, TypeScript, and Sass. :)
Laravel is my favorite backend framework. <3
Working on it daily both professionally and personally, I have gained good experience that allows me to use it in all my web projects today.
Although I am not yet completely comfortable with VueJS, it is by far the Front-End framework I am most proficient with.
I like its approach to the virtual DOM, unlike React which I find much less orderly.
NestJS is a framework I quite like because, unlike a project built around Express, it provides us with a good architecture to follow.
This is highly appreciated when you want to write maintainable and readable code for everyone.
Often poorly perceived due to the intensive use of its compiled form, Bootstrap remains an excellent base graphic library offering many tools.
I always take great pleasure in using it in new projects; I love its great modularity.
Prisma is my pleasant surprise of the year 2024. :)
Having discovered it through various school projects this year, I was pleasantly surprised by its ease of use, but also by its great versatility.
Sequelize is the first ORM I touched, long before Laravel Eloquent.
Even though today I prefer to use Prisma, I know it quite well and would always be ready to work with it again. :)
Having programmed in PHP for many years (since 2019), I have created many projects with this language.
Ranging from simple websites to custom frameworks, I have built a solid knowledge base over the years.
Many love it, many hate it, but it must be acknowledged that TypeScript has brought a real breath of fresh air to JavaScript.
Having developed many applications with ECMA Script 5, TS was THE revelation. Long live typing!
As with TS, I don't think Sass can be classified as a language. But well, okay.
Sass allows for the simple creation of graphic libraries for your project. It is literally a 'must have'; I haven't been able to do without it for several years.
I am far from being an expert in Java, but since I develop with it quite regularly, I can't omit it from this list either.
I quite like Java; I find the language pretty cool.
Exactly like for Java, I am not an expert in C#, but also far from being a beginner.
I have developed many game prototypes in C# through Unity, as well as a few small command-line applications with .NET.
Managing servers running Linux for many years (since 2014), I have no difficulty using Linux on a daily basis.
I really enjoy creating the interfaces for my personal projects. To do this, Figma is just the best tool that exists. However, since my profession is neither graphics nor design, I can spend a lot of time designing a mockup.
Having had to configure several continuous integrations on various personal projects, I had to learn to master GitLab and its CI/CD system.
I have also worked with GitHub Actions on a few projects, but in a less in-depth manner.
Métacafé is a project I completed as part of my master's in web development at Efrei Paris, during several graded projects.
Initially designed as a messaging app similar to WhatsApp with VueJS and ExpressJS, I revisited it a few months later for a GraphDB lab. The modifications required on the server were so extensive that the project was forked, and the server was completely rewritten around the GraphQL framework. The application was kept as a base but was heavily modified to meet the new architecture. Additionally, its design was also revamped to address the new lab's objective, which was to create an application similar to Twitter (see the last two images).
Finally, I picked up the project one last time for a project very similar to the first one, but this time using RabbitMQ for communication between different users. The project was neither forked nor rewritten. On the contrary, this allowed me to complete it.
In its ideal form, Métacafé is a social network application that allows users to meet others with the same interests defined during their registration on the app. However, for various reasons such as lack of time, skills during the project's development, and the complexity of the task, Métacafé could not be completed as I would have liked. Nonetheless, it remains an interesting project that allowed me to explore new technologies and new ways of thinking about web application development.
The project has been entirely made with AVIF pictures (AV1 Image File), a relatively recent format that was not yet widely supported by all web browser at the project creation. Profile pictures sent by the users are also converted into this format, thankfully to the Sharp library.
The technical choice of using this format against WEBP or PNG, has been made because of its great compression algorithm efficiency. Indeed, AVIF pictures offers a better quality for the same file size compared to older formats. So, it is possible to save bandwith by reducing pictures file size without lossing quality.
GitHub Repository (original version): https://github.com/SofianeLasri/metacafe
GitHub Repository (GraphQL version): https://github.com/SofianeLasri/metacafe-graphql
Demo Site: https://metacafe.sl-projects.com
⚠️ Please do not enter sensitive data on the demo site!
This project is somewhat complex. Originally, it was only supposed to be my portfolio. I wanted to gather all my personal projects there, as evidenced by the initial mockups and screenshots attached below.
Before this project, I was already developing a website to meet this need. However, I had based it on my homemade framework, VBcms 2. The downside of this choice was that I had to implement all the new features I wanted to add to the framework myself. Development was therefore very slow and tedious, in addition to being exhausting in the long run. So I took advantage of my first internship to take a complete break from its development, to take the time to learn new things at work, but also to redesign a new, more elegant design than ever.
Development of the site resumed during the summer of 2022, where I actively started creating new mockups. Then, I restarted the project from scratch, this time based on the Laravel framework, used by the company that hired me (Kang). However, creating mockups takes time. It was also the first time I used real modern tools for mockups, first testing Adobe XD, then preferring Figma later.
The Laravel project now created and well underway, I thought it would be a good idea to create an admin panel that would allow me to manage the site's content.
Because it's true that with VBcms 2, I no longer really had to worry about this part. The framework, resembling more of a CMS, allowed me to manage content very simply from the admin interface. No authentication to manage, built-in permission system, and above all, no admin interface to develop, everything was already ready (or almost).
However, this was not the case with Laravel (and anyway, I wasn't interested in templates and project mockups). So it had to be created. That's when I discovered the Laravel ecosystem, which quite simply allows you to implement complex features to develop yourself.
If the showcase/public part of the website was almost finished in March 2023, the admin part never was (until the project was stopped on June 15, 2024). Indeed, wishing to absolutely create the perfect project, I spent an enormous amount of time developing the various features of the admin interface. Moreover, no longer being able to work as much as before on VBcms 2 due to my internship, development times literally exploded.
For example, it took me several months to simply make authentication functional on the project with the various related subdomains (something that Laravel does not natively support). I also spent a lot of time developing the media library, which was supposed to allow uploading files to the site to use them for creating blog articles or project pages.
However, I do not regret the time spent on it. This project was beneficial to me in many ways.
First of all, it's the first project I completed using a framework. I learned a lot, and it allowed me to gain real experience with Laravel. Having touched almost every aspect of the framework, I now know all the features it offers.
Finally, the work done on this project is not entirely to be discarded. Indeed, in the future, I will reuse the admin interface I developed for other projects. Its design system is quite complete and allows for all kinds of interfaces.
I would have liked to implement a permission system, but, being the only user of the site, I always postponed the development of this feature.
Originally, this server was not meant to be public. Indeed, having a (physical) server at home, I started hosting Minecraft multiplayer games for me and my friends. But, I thought it would be cool to let others enjoy it, so I started adapting one of my existing servers (the one we went to the most) to open it to the public.
This project was never really serious; I always worked on it occasionally. This explains why its duration is so long while very few features and improvements have been added over time, but also its rather lame and unoriginal name...
At its peak activity, there were 2 of us working on the project, me and Gagafeee, plus another person who did moderation (but it was never really necessary given the low traffic on the server).
To make the project work, we had various sub-projects.
The first sub-project was the most important since it was the server itself, managed through our custom-developed plugin. Its operation was relatively simple. It allowed us to roughly track player activity (entries and exits, thus inducing playtime), but also allowed players to teleport to a random position on the map while staying within the pre-generated area to maintain reasonable performance.
Following the development of the plugin, I started creating the project Better jLoquent.
The second sub-project was the Discord bot, which served no more and no less than to relay messages sent from the server to a Discord channel, and vice versa.
Finally, the last project and also the least important, the website. It has always been the ugly duckling of the SL-Craft project due to the lack of time we had to develop it, but also its lack of interest compared to the other two projects.
However, it had a shop section allowing users to view all the shops created by players in the game. But honestly, the site was very poorly optimized and created on a very basic site foundation (originally created for my PHP labs at university). I did start the project again on Laravel a few months later, but the Minecraft server was already abandoned.
In the end, I only really worked on this project between January 25, 2022, and October 31, 2022. The time spent before was not on developing any application, and the time spent after was thinking about how I could improve the existing server (which eventually led to its abandonment).
It's worth mentioning that being more interested in creating games in realistic 3D environments, I didn't see much interesting future in creating Minecraft projects.
However, I remain open to a new server project; the idea is still cool. We'll see how to organize it and what its features would be.
Note: The archive.org archive may be broken. :')
To complete my PRISM bachelor's degree, I had to create a small project based on Django, a Python web framework. Honestly, we didn't have much time, only about 2 weeks. So I created the site as quickly as possible, and here is the result.
It's not too bad, but still far from great... x)
For this project, I decided to use the name of the fictional racing team from GRID 2, and imagine what their website might have looked like at the time of the game (~2013). That's why it looks old despite being created in 2023. xD
Since it was the first time I used Django, it took me a little while to understand how it worked. I like its fairly simple approach and the tools it provides, such as its admin interface for managing the database. A kind of simplified PhpMyAdmin. However, its poor performance and the fact that it is based on Python make me think that I won't use it for other projects.
When I started working on my Minecraft server, SL-Craft, I quickly began to feel the need for an ORM that could help me interact with my database. So I started looking for solutions, but none seemed simple and efficient enough for what I wanted to do. Since I was already familiar with Laravel, I decided to take inspiration from its ORM, Eloquent, to create my own ORM in Java. However, this represents a significant amount of work, so I decided to start from an existing project to save time.
After some research on the internet, I came across the project jLoquent, but unfortunately, it seemed abandoned for several years. Being practically unusable as it was, I had to completely debug it to understand how it worked. After several days of working on it, I finally managed to get it working, and I decided to fork it to continue its development.
The modifications I made to jLoquent are not very numerous, but they at least helped clarify its functionality through a small documentation. I also added some features that bring it closer to the behavior of Laravel Eloquent.
Currently, the project is on hold. Having created it to meet a specific need related to my Minecraft server, I no longer need it today. However, I remain open to any contributions, and it is not excluded that I may resume its development if, of course, I have the opportunity to work on a Java project that requires the use of a small ORM.
After my bachelor's year at the IUT of Orsay, I planned to move towards a specialized course in game development and creation. But for that, I first had to find a work-study program. Unlike a work-study program in web development, it is surprisingly extremely difficult. But I eventually received a response to one of my applications. They then asked me to make a demo by copying their game.
I had a lot of fun with it, but I wasn't accepted. And anyway, I'm not sure I would have liked working there. The performance is commendable, even though honestly, the code is really not good*.
*The game's physics are calculated at each frame. This means that if your phone lags a bit, you can literally pass over the water without it being detected.
VBcms is my first major project in web development.
At that time, I was developing many small websites with similar architecture. One day, I thought it would be interesting to create a common base that I could modify at will to speed up the development process.
Thus, the VBcms project was born. Originally, it was just a simple loading screen manager for Garry's Mod. But quickly, I started developing a new version intended to be much more modular, which was supposed to manage any type of web content.
In developing this project, I learned a lot. Almost all my basics in web programming, whether in PHP, JS, or even CSS, were acquired with this project. Ultimately, VBcms resembled more of a microframework with a rather primitive operation, but laying the foundations of a system that standardized web project development.
However, it is important to note that at that time, I had no knowledge of object-oriented programming, nor even concerning frameworks (I didn't even know what they were). That's also why the project is a vast mix of procedural and object-oriented programming.
When I joined Kang for my first paid internship in a company, I learned to use the Laravel framework. That's when I realized that what I had been developing for over a year was exactly the definition of a framework. However, my project being undocumented, poorly organized, and filled with bad coding practices, I decided to abandon it. Additionally, its interest had become completely null in my eyes. Laravel is by far much more powerful, more complete, and above all, much better designed.
But I remain quite proud of this project. It was extremely instructive for me and remains a fine piece of work in my eyes.
Note: VBcms stands for "Very Basic Content Management System". :)
This project is a school project with the objective of creating a mobile video game. We decided to create a real-time multiplayer game in two dimensions, with an artistic direction strongly inspired by the game "Rabbids Go Home".
However, due to our lack of knowledge in video game creation, the multiplayer part could not be implemented and the level design was greatly simplified.
This project remains a great experience that I am quite satisfied with. :)
