Avril / France VAE

Overview

Avril is a state-incubated (beta.gouv.fr) digital public service that makes the French VAE process — validation des acquis de l’expérience, getting an official diploma for skills learned through work experience — easier to navigate. The work is fully open source, and the mission lives on today as France VAE.

My Role

I joined as a full-stack engineer on the founding team and built the MVP from scratch in Elixir / Phoenix. Beyond the code, I worked the beta.gouv.fr way: shipping small, measuring real usage, and iterating with data-driven product management rather than a fixed spec.

Key Challenges

• Public-service constraints. Building for a government audience means accessibility, clarity, and trust come first — the UI has to work for everyone, not just the tech-savvy.
• MVP under uncertainty. The product hypothesis was still being validated, so the architecture had to stay cheap to change while we learned what actually helped users.

Outcome

The startup phase ran its course and ended the way beta.gouv.fr projects are meant to: the work was a success and got integrated into the state’s own services, carried forward as France VAE — a nationwide public service. The code is open source on GitHub, so it stays the piece of my work I can point to as fully reviewable, public-good engineering.