Hi, I'm François Best

I am a developer, an open source lover and a writer from France.

This is my digital garden, where I write about the things I'm working on and share what I've learned.

Dark Mode For Excalidraw

5 June 2020

Front-end
CSS
Excalidraw
How to give a dark twist to Excalidraw diagrams with CSS filters.

The Security of GitHub Actions

24 February 2020

security
tooling
GitHub Actions are a great way to build powerful customised CI/CD workflows using the power of community-driven resources, but they can be tricky to get right in terms of security.

Password Reset for End-to-End Encrypted Applications

15 February 2020

e2ee
security
cryptography
We forget passwords. Usually it's OK, because most websites implement a password reset feature. But how to do this in end-to-end encrypted applications that don't have access to the password in the first place ?
All articles

Projects#

Read more about my open source work.


About Me#

I live in Nancy (France), but my heart belongs to Grenoble, where my wife and I met and plan to settle in the near future, with our first child on the way.

I love cycling, both for transportation and tourism. With my friends, I've toured across 7 countries on my bike, along the French Atlantic coast, in the Alps and in the Balkans:

We rode 1010km, 11697m of elevation, for 65+ hours, across Albania, Montenegro, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Slovenia and Italy.

This is a screenshot of a progressive web app I made for us to track our journeys, it's called Stravels and allowed us to stitch together our Strava activities onto a map.


Career#

47ng

founder

2018 - present

I do freelance development for various clients:

  • L'Acquéreur

    A French startup helping real-estate buyers and sellers meet.
    Meteor.js
    Styled-Components
    Web Design

  • Pulsar Audio

    Embedded UI for Digigram's Iqoya Talk, a mobile broadcast recording studio.
    C++
    Qt
    QML
    Embedded Linux
    UI Design

  • Grenoble Applied Economics Laboratory

    I built a Next.js webapp for an economics experiment ran by my wife's team.
    Next.js
    TypeScript
    Jamstack
    a11y

Slate Digital

2011 - 2018

I wore many hats when working at Slate Digital, from C++ programming for real-time pro audio applications to DSP algorithm design and tooling in Python and Ruby.

C++
Python
Ruby
Digital Signal Processing
Algorithm Design
Real-Time Audio

Arturia

2010

I helped design the MiniBrute analog synthesizer when I was an intern at Arturia. It was my first professional experience and a lot of fun.

I had the privilege of working with a great team led by Yves Usson, from whom I had learned analog synthesis before joining Arturia.

C++
Analog Electronics
Synthesizer Design
Hardware Design

This website is open source, and was made with Next.js and ChakraUI, two of my current favourite techs.