“Working on a massively called API is a real challenge”, Thomas Hamou
- Name: Thomas Hamou
- Job title: API Software Engineer
- Arrival at Dailymotion: 16/08/2018
- Favourite band: Depeche Mode
- Favourite pizza: Foie gras, gorgonzola & mascarpone
- Favourite Street Fighter character: M.Bison
What does it mean to be an API software engineer at Dailymotion?
“In a few words, my job is to improve Dailymotion’s REST API and to keep it alive. It means monitoring the public API, solving issues when necessary and anticipating the transition toward the next GraphQL API that we are currently developing for our internal use and for our partners.”
What kind of technologies are you working on every day?
“I mainly code in PHP, Javascript server-side with MySQL, ElasticSearch, memcache… I also manage some administration tasks on Linux, I use the ELK stack to monitor applications and I love learning and using other languages, like Bash, C, Go…”
Have you always worked on these technologies?
“When I started my career, the distinction between back-end and front-end engineers was not that obvious. We were all kind of full-stack developers. Our jobs were simpler at the time, without mobiles, responsive design and with less Javascript libraries… Then I quickly started working mostly in back-end developing and at the same time managed a lot of system administration tasks: server-side configuration, debugging, monitoring and performance investigations.”
What was your background before joining Dailymotion?
“After graduating from SUPINFO Paris (an institution of higher education in computer science), I worked on PHP and I learned some CMS and frameworks, such as Zend, Symfony, EzPublish, WordPress and some other exotic products. I’ve been working in the press business for 8 years, first at Editions Larivière and then for Prisma Media. Press and video are close universes with similar architectures. An article has a title, a text and images, and it’s not that different from a video, when you think about it. That’s why I joined Dailymotion: to work on video projects and experiment new technical challenges.”
What’s your favourite part of your job?
“Working on a massively called API is a real challenge. I also like the fact that Dailymotion is agile and has many products with a large variety of languages. It is an incredible opportunity for me to compare and use different technologies to achieve my goals, so my daily job is never monotonous.”
How did you start coding in the first place?
“When I was in college in the early 2000, I created a website dedicated to party pictures with a friend. It was a kind of Facebook before Facebook. We started to develop, moderate, create filters… Many people were into it and it quickly became impossible to manage. Finally, the project aborted after a few weeks. But that’s a funny memory and that’s what made me start coding in HTML to create static website pages, coding in JavaScript to add some dynamic on web pages and using PHP and MySQL to manage accounts.”