Meeting with Lucien, Nocode Expert and the Academy's Mediterranean touch

Born in Monaco and born in Nice, this tech epicurean has not only known life simplified by Nocode tools, a mechanical engineer by training, he has a long academic and professional career littered with expatriations and entrepreneurial experiences...

Hello Lucien. First of all I'd like to thank you because you are the first of the team to try this exercise. Could you introduce yourself and tell us about your background?

I left Monaco and the life under the umbrella pines just before the year 2000 to start my studies in Paris. I followed a mechanical engineering course in the early 2000s, at the ESTACA school. 

In fact, at the time, the programming exams were a bit different, we coded on paper!(laughs) Once I graduated, I went on to do a second master's degree at ESSEC, this time in international business. I started my career as a business engineer for the Airbus group, based in Bangkok.

How did you go from trading to Nocode?

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Ah, I must say that I've always liked digital... Already, in pre-preparatory school, I was "tweaking" other people's blogs for free to get my hands on CSS. At the time, "the place to be" was the Skyblog and Overblog platforms. Generation Y still speaks to you?

Then Nocode came into my life, without warning, and seduced the hybrid engineer-commercial profile that I represented! When I started to get interested in entrepreneurship, it was the perfect time. I co-founded a first startup in finance in 2015 where I had to partner with developers. Following that, I discovered the Nocode Bubble tool. I trained in it with the aim of launching other startups. At the beginning, it was really to avoid having to recruit "classic devs" for my entrepreneurial projects.

For those who read you and would be interested in creating apps, could you describe in a few words what Nocode is for you?

In my opinion, Nocode will profoundly change society by giving the power to create software to a whole new category of people. A bit like the social networks that have suddenly given a voice to citizens and not only to politicians and journalists. In fact, people are already talking about "citizen developers" or "citizen makers".

At what point did you feel like not just being a "citizen maker" but making Nocode your job?

Passionate about Bubble, I quickly became one of the first instructors for the official Bootcamps of the editor himself, it was nice recognition! I also launched, in 2018, the "Bubble Paris" meetup, which still continues. Today, we are over a thousand active members. We even managed to get Emmanuel Straschnov, the co-founder of Bubble, to come to Alegria.group's offices for an edition of the meetup at the end of 2021.

At the same time, the same year, I became a professional by setting up my first Nocode development agency. This was followed by a two-year experience at AirDev, a 100% Nocode agency... Bubble (you guessed it!) located in the United States. In 2021, I decided to leave my position to join Alegria.group, as Chief Innovation Officer. I wanted to contribute to the Nocode revolution in France.

We know your reputation as an advanced Bubble user. Are you still working exclusively on this tool?

To be honest, my favourite tool is still Bubble for its flexibility, and because when I started Nocode in 2017, there were not many tools and few were as solid as this one. It is practical, you can create all types of web applications, even the most complex ones!

However, recently I have "fallen in love" with Bravo Studio. It's an incredibly elegant tool from a technical point of view that allows you to create mobile applications with a really "wow" design.

The school opens soon, you will meet the first class of future Nocodeurs... Not too stressed?

(Laughs) No, I'm quite happy to be able to pass on what I've learned. I hope they are motivated because I am! We've put together a crazy programme for them.

Can you tell us more about the training programme?

The training lasts 1 year. The first three months are dedicated to the training itself. Then the last 9 months will be spent in the field, at our partner companies. This is an opportunity to put into practice, on concrete cases, all the notions taught during the first months. This is the ideal way to quickly develop your skills.

As far as the end-of-course learning outcomes are concerned, they are manifold. At the end of the three months, students should be able to plan the development of a simple application, architect solutions, build a data model, research solutions and document their work.

How do you plan to pass on your knowledge?

For me, the most important thing is to have an adapted pedagogy: sharing, benevolence and availability are the key words. I still intend to let them rack their brains a bit.

Your promise to students in one sentence?

Give them the right methods and reflexes to make them pro makers in the making.

And when you're not "nocoding", what do you do in your free time?

When my professional life was a little less intense I liked to do stand-up paddling.

One last one for the road... the teacher who marked your life?

My Chinese teacher. I almost gave up my engineering studies to become a Chinese teacher. I was fascinated by the fact of starting from scratch to learn a language: a grammatical system that has nothing to do with it, a different paradigm for conjugation, no possible reference for writing... A bit like learning to code in fact :)

If you are curious to meet Lucien before the beginning of the school year, you can find him every Wednesday at 1:30 pm on the Twitch channel of No-code France where he tests tools live!