A collaborative platform for France's urban planning agencies

Context#

The FNAU — Fédération Nationale des Agences d’Urbanisme — is the national body that brings together France’s urban planning agencies, their staff, and their collaborative working groups. The federation needed a bespoke internal platform to structure and support that collaboration: directories of agencies and their employees, a space for working groups to organise events, share documents, and hold discussions. It wasn’t a complex product by enterprise standards, but it had to work reliably for a professional community spread across the country — and it had to be delivered against a signed public procurement contract, with fixed scope and fixed deadlines.

Wixiweb won the tender. The project was handed to me to build.

Tech Stack#

The stack was chosen freely — which was unusual enough to be worth mentioning. With no legacy to inherit, I selected Zend Framework 3 with MySQL, Bootstrap for the front end, and Webpack for asset bundling. The combination was well-suited to the project’s profile: a structured, feature-rich application that didn’t need to be flashy, but did need to be solid and maintainable. Trello handled task management; a dedicated staging environment gave the client a running view of progress throughout development.

My Role#

This was the first project I owned end-to-end as a lead developer. My involvement started before a single line of code was written: once my manager had analysed the tender documents, he handed me the feature list to scope and estimate. Translating a public procurement spec into a credible, line-by-line effort estimate — one that would be signed off and held to — was new territory. A good introduction to the cost-of-complexity thinking that project management demands.

Once the contract was signed, I had full technical ownership. I designed the architecture, broke the feature list into Trello cards with detailed implementation specs for each, and then built the platform: an agency and staff directory, a working group directory with membership management, an events agenda, a document management system for file sharing and collaboration within each club, per-club discussion forums, and an admin interface for user and club management.

My manager handled client communication and project oversight — weekly check-ins where I reported progress against milestones. The staging environment meant the client could validate features incrementally rather than seeing everything for the first time at launch. That rhythm worked. Every milestone landed on time. The production deployment went smoothly. The client signed off satisfied.

The scope was respected. The deadlines were respected. For a first solo delivery, that’s the benchmark that matters. The V1 was mine, from the first estimate to production.

Tutoring an apprentice#

In 2018, Wixiweb hired a junior developer on a work-study contract, and I applied to become his tutor for a year. This project was where I supported him: I trained him and guided his first steps on the codebase. I made everything I could to help him and make sure he got his diploma. And he did! He joined once the V1 was live. Over time he took over, and ended up building the V2 entirely on his own.

He was later hired full-time and is still at Wixiweb today. He is now the unofficial lead for all of our e-commerce clients, and plays a major role in the company’s infrastructure and sysadmin work. I’m proud to have been part of his start.

Retrospective#

This project stays with me — not because it was technically ambitious, but because of what it represented. It was the first time I was trusted to carry a project on my own, from reading a public tender to shipping to production. My manager gave me the room to prove myself, and I made good on it. The result was a promotion, which felt like the right punctuation mark.

What I built that year wasn’t just a working application. I built habits: writing specs before touching code, tracking progress against a quote, communicating proactively rather than waiting to be asked. Those disciplines have stayed with me across every project since. Technically, I’ve done more complex things. Personally, this one counts more than most.