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.
Available from mid-June 2026
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
● Open to work
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 on Google Cloud Document AI, 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.
I'm currently considering senior backend roles, fully remote, with companies based in France or the EU. I'm especially interested in distributed systems, SaaS platforms and backend architecture.