My name is Jisselin Djilo.
Call me Cj.
A developer of close to six years, based in Douala. I work with teams I never meet: a startup in France, an agency in Texas, a firm in Yaoundé. Front-end in Vue.js and React, back-end in Laravel and Node.js, and one habit that still surprises colleagues: I write the tests before anyone asks for them.
01 · Geography
Douala, and the rest of the world
Since 2020, most of my work has gone through a screen. MCAP in Texas, INAIRIS in France: I have never set foot in their offices. At OBOSSO, whose team is in France, we had a room in Douala where the Cameroonian team met now and then. The rest of the time, remote like everyone else. Six hours of difference on one side, one hour on the other.
Working this way forces three things. Writing clearly, because a misunderstanding gets settled the next day and not in the corridor. Deciding alone, because the tech lead is asleep. And documenting, because what I don’t write down does not exist for the team.
This isn’t a constraint I put up with, it’s how I learned the job. A distributed team doesn’t have to teach me how to be one.
- Time zone
- UTC+1, aligned with Paris
- English
- Professional, 2 years of US clients
- Experience
- Six years, across three countries
02 · Method
I code, I test, I document
Three verbs, in that order. The third is the one almost everyone skips, and the one that costs the most six months later.
Vue.js, React, Laravel, Node.js. I’m not attached to frameworks: I shipped Angular at OBOSSO without having chosen it, and Flutter on Click&Go. What transfers is how you cut a problem into pieces.
Cypress for user journeys, PHPUnit for logic, Postman and cURL for APIs. I don’t chase a coverage percentage: I cover what is expensive to get wrong. On an invoicing product, that isn’t the same thing as on a brochure site.
At OBOSSO I wrote the technical documentation and the operating procedures. They are still in use. It is the part of the job nobody brags about, and the one that decides whether your successor curses your name.
03 · Away from the code
What I do when I get out of the chair
To me, enjoyment is a duty.
It is not a reward you grant yourself once the work is done, but something you plan for like everything else.
I’m passionate about travel. I go whenever I can, mostly to meet other ways of living. I have visited nine of Cameroon’s ten regions, one to go. And I swim, I play football, I dance: the logical counterweight to a job done entirely sitting down.
If you want the short version of all this: my CV as a PDF, in French or in English.