DocuForge: Adding AI to my paperless-ngx Workflow
How I went from existing paperless-ngx AI tools, to an overengineered 4090-powered orchestrator, to building my own lightweight OCR and tagging pipeline.
A new adventure is on the horizon
Building reliable backends
from south-west France.
Six years with TypeScript, NestJS and PostgreSQL. Technical lead at Stiilt since 2023. I design backend systems that hold up in production: queues, retries, idempotency, observability and business-critical integrations.
Experience
6 yrs
Stack
TS · NestJS
Location
43.7° N · Gers
Status
● New chapter ahead
About
A backend engineer at home in two languages and two countries.
I grew up in the UK and now live in the Gers, in south-west France. I have worked fully remote for the last three years.
My day job is designing distributed backend systems: multi-tenant SaaS platforms, queues and workers, external integrations, and services that need to stay reliable in production. I joined Stiilt as a junior developer in 2020 and grew into the technical lead role in 2023.
Outside of work I run a small homelab, photograph the night sky with my own telescope setup, and play music, badly but with enthusiasm.
Work
Six years at Stiilt, modernising a leasing platform and building FPS Navigator.
Stiilt
Senior Full Stack Developer, Backend & Architecture
2020-2026
FPS Navigator
B2B SaaS · shipped
Automated parking-fine management platform integrated with France's national traffic authority (ANTAI), on a multi-tenant architecture.
- Designed an OCR + AI pipeline, cutting per-fine processing from ~15 min to ~30 sec.
- Built a distributed BullMQ / Redis architecture with queues, retry policies and monitoring, scaled for ~35,000 fines/day.
- Developed a secured partner API: API keys, payload validation, request signing, fine upload.
- Implemented payment, notification and recharging workflows in a multi-tenant environment.
Neo-leasing platform
B2B2C platform · shipped
Web and mobile vehicle-leasing application covering the full customer lifecycle: subscription, contract, inspection, vehicle access and fleet tracking.
- Migrated a legacy .NET backend to NestJS / TypeORM / PostgreSQL.
- Built modules for contracts, digital inspection reports, automated KYC and multi-channel payments.
- Near real-time telemetry for ~200 vehicles via a standalone WebSocket relay on Kubernetes.
- Integrated virtual key access via the Continental SDK and NFC.
Technical lead
From 2023
Set backend standards across the company and supported the team as it grew.
- Defined NestJS module structure, API conventions, error handling and data validation.
- Code reviews and mentoring for junior developers and interns.
- Led technical scoping and architecture decisions for new features and migrations.
- Authored French R&D tax credit (CIR/CII) filings covering technical innovation.
Stack
What I reach for.
Backend
- TypeScript
- NestJS
- Node.js
- PostgreSQL
- TypeORM
- BullMQ / Redis
- REST API design
Frontend
- Angular
- React
- TypeScript
Infrastructure
- Kubernetes (GKE)
- Docker
- Helm
- CI/CD
Architecture
- Multi-tenant SaaS
- Standalone services
- Workers / queues
- Event-driven
- Distributed systems
Methods
- Technical specification
- Code review
- Quality standards
- Agile
Homelab
A small rack in the corner of the office.
Self-hosting is how I learn ops on hardware I own. The setup grows and shrinks; this is a peek at what's running today.
// things move around a lot; read the latest State of the Lab here
rack-01.degaujac.lan online ●
U1 Compute N100 Proxmox host · bare-metal Ubuntu server
U2 Storage 8 TB SHR
U3 Networking UDM Pro · 4G backup · Headscale
U4 AI NVIDIA 4090 · Qwen3.6:27b · llama.cpp
U5 Services Immich · Vaultwarden · Pi-hole · Traefik · Gitea
U6 Observability Prometheus + Grafana · Loki
Sky
Photographs of things very far away.
The sky around my home in the Gers is around Bortle 3. I photograph deep-sky objects with a small refractor on a tracking mount, then stack the frames in PixInsight. It is slow, precise work, with a very different rhythm from software.
Writing
Notes on backends, the sky, and the rack in the corner.
May 2026 // homelab
6 MIN READ
Apr 2026 // homelab
State of the Lab — Spring 2026
A technical tour of my current homelab: network segmentation, Proxmox, Docker, backups, GitOps, observability, and a few local AI experiments.
8 MIN READ
Mar 2026 // astrophoto
Hunting the Twin Quasar near NGC 3079
Resolving Q0957+561, the first confirmed gravitational lens, with a small refractor, a 533-based camera, and a bit of 2x drizzle.
5 MIN READ
Contact
Let's talk.
My next professional chapter is taking shape. I'm always happy to connect and talk about distributed systems, SaaS platforms and backend architecture.