From software engineer to Homiwoo’s technical officer

Having joined Homiwoo at the very start, Jérôme Rutily’s role has evolved from a purely technical one in software development to ensuring the overall coherence of the platform’s architecture.

Ever since Homiwoo opened for business in 2017, Jérôme Rutily has been supporting the company with his expertise as a software engineer. Having completed his studies at ENSIMAG, an engineering school in Grenoble, he worked for a series of digital service companies as a developer, helping to deliver projects in a wide range of sectors, including telecoms, transport, energy, banking and technology. Invited to join the newly-formed Homiwoo by Adrien, who he had known during their student days together at the engineering school, Jérôme didn’t think twice.

“It was just what I was looking for after spending 10 years with service providers, where you work on a lot of projects without really knowing what happens to them afterwards,” he explains. “By joining the company right at the start, I could lay the groundwork and then watch this baby grow!” Jérôme adds, having learned all about the property business over the past five years.

As a software engineer, he is responsible for designing IT solutions that are tailored to the specific needs of clients. In practice, that means working on virtually every aspect of the property sector in a general way, with an approach that focuses less on the user experience and more on the data. “We are mainly dealing with databases, and a bit less with web technology,” he says, before highlighting the three key characteristics needed for such a role: rigour, adaptability and curiosity.

Avoiding working in a bubble

While rigour is essential for coding something that will last, knowing how to make use of ideas from outside the company is also fundamentally important, hence the need for adaptability. As for curiosity, it means finding out what people are doing in other industries, and then using that for inspiration. “Because the IT world moves very quickly,” Jérôme points out. “Tools that are only five years old can already be obsolete, so you mustn’t stay in your own little bubble and keep doing the same thing all the time!”

It's a belief that sums up his own career, as Jérôme Rutily now spends less of his time coding and more of it helping other developers to solve problems in order to guarantee the overall quality of the code. With his new job title of ‘Technical Officer’, his role is to support colleagues at Homiwoo if they have a technical problem – helping them to make better use of the tools available to them, so that they learn how to achieve the best possible outcome. In doing so, he also ensures that the solutions being developed are homogenous. “Using common methodologies means that anyone can work on what other people have done. It’s really important for a growing company, with new colleagues joining all the time,” Jérôme points out.

The importance of client feedback

This supervisory role also means that he can monitor the progress of projects that he helped to create, such as the portfolio management solution that enables Homiwoo’s clients to perform mass valuations of very large property portfolios. “If a tool is being further developed, I don’t necessarily have to be directly involved, but I do need to take part in the meetings, so that I can steer people in the right direction,” he explains.

One of Jérôme’s main sources of job satisfaction is the pride he experiences when he receives feedback from happy users. “Recently, Homiwoo took part in a trade show attended by a lot of our users. One of them came to our stand during the presentation of a product, a report entitled “Strategic Asset Plan”, and told the other visitors just how much this solution had changed his life. It was magical to see something like that from an extremely satisfied user,” Jérôme recalls, still clearly moved.

Along with such feedback, he also appreciates the friendly atmosphere within the company, which Jérôme believes is both an advantage and a source of motivation. “Everybody, including the co-founders, are up for self-mockery and the jokes come pretty quickly,” he says, before adding: “We’re relaxed when we’re chatting, so that we can be totally focused when we’re working.”