Greg Lafrance - Seasoned Technical Leader

I started out in the tech industry as a QA Engineer at Broadbase Software in Menlo Park, California. Broadbase hired me for my advanced skills in the Japanese language (reading, writing, speaking), to test the Japanese version of their data mart application. There I was number one in bugs reported. In addition to black box testing I wrote automation scripts for white box testing. After two years I secured a position as localization engineer at Adobe Systems, where for eight years I worked in Perl, Python and Java, contributing to a large-scale localization system that was fully integrated into the daily build system. This localization system parsed various formats of code files to extract localizable strings, leverage existing translations, pseudo-translate new strings, and auto-generate MS Excel based localization kits for translators and reviewers. Desiring to continue moving up the food chain, I studied and practiced Adobe Flex, at one point being the number one contributor to the Adobe Flex Forums, with most of my posts answering other persons' questions on Flex. After 8 years at Adobe Systems, I left the company to become a developer. My first developer position was the one developer at vChatter, a group-chat application written in Adobe Flex. I was the fourth employee hired into this startup. I was solely responsible for front-end development, and also for back-end integration with 3rd-party peer-to-peer networking to facilitate communication between six video pods in each group chat topic session (cats, sports, books, whatever). With the decline of Adobe Flex because Steve Jobs would not allow the Flash Player on Apple devices, usage of Adobe Flex rapidly declined, and I transitioned to developing in ExtJS, then the leading enterprise-level JavaScript framework. With the emergence and rapid popularity of Angular and React, and also NodeJS and MongoDB, I transitioned into positions primarily using Angular, using React in personal projects. At this point I had developed a high level of expertise in vanilla JavaScript, HTML, CSS, SASS, SQL, NodeJS, MongoDB, Adobe Flex, Java, and other technologies. I also became proficient in setting up servers on DigitalOcean and earlier VPS providers, enjoying learning the ins and outs of server setup and hardening. At one point I decided to create video courses on Udemy, but unfortunately I chose two subjects that were already over-saturated, HTML and JavaScript, but the experience was valuable and enjoyable, as I love creating training materials and curriculum, and video production. In 2024 / 2025 I studied the Rust programming language, attracted by its complexity and utility, along the way creating 29 blog posts from Rust basics to advanced topics: ByteMagma.com. I also leveraged the first 18 blog posts into self-published book on Amazon: Foundations of Rust. Now in 2025 I have done significant research on AI, AI Chatbots, and Agentic AI. It is an exciting time, and once again, technology is about to transform our economy. I feel privileged to be a part of this new era.