Joël Charles

Software Architect • Technical Product Leadership

Software architect and former CTO with experience building, modernizing, and scaling web platforms. Combines product strategy, technical leadership, and hands-on engineering to turn user and business needs into pragmatic technical decisions and measurable product outcomes.

Experience

Open Source Developer

Magne Studio
Jan 2023 – Present

Built and maintained open-source tooling within the Vite ecosystem, improving framework interoperability, developer experience and deployment workflows for modern web applications.

  • Owned and contributed to the Vike ecosystem, delivering framework improvements, extensions, a new project generator (vike.dev/new) and community support
  • Created Universal Middleware, enabling middleware to be written once and run across multiple runtimes and frameworks, including Hono, Express and Cloudflare
  • Created Universal Deploy, enabling zero-config deployment of Vite applications across frameworks such as Vike, Astro, TanStack Start and Vanilla Vite, and platforms including Netlify, Cloudflare, Vercel and self-hosting
  • Developed vite-plugin-vercel, an adapter for packaging and deploying Vite applications on Vercel through the Vercel Output API
  • Collaborated with the Vite and broader Open Source communities on technical discussions, interoperability challenges and ecosystem improvements

Founder

What's New Games
Feb 2022 – Feb 2026

Founded and developed a platform centralizing video game patch notes, addressing the fragmented nature of game updates by providing gamers with a single, reliable source to discover and track changes across their games.

  • Designed and developed the product end-to-end, from information aggregation and data processing to the web experience (Node.js, TypeScript, React)
  • Built automated data collection, processing and synchronization pipelines to aggregate patch notes from multiple sources (SQS, MongoDB, C#)
  • Designed a scalable asynchronous architecture to process and synchronize large volumes of game update data
  • Designed data models and storage systems to structure and efficiently serve a large and continuously evolving dataset
  • Managed the product's technical stack and infrastructure, integrating and maintaining the services required to operate the platform

Co-founder & CTO

Station
Apr 2020 – Sep 2022

Co-founded and led the technical development of Station (Y Combinator W18, backed by Accel Partners), an Open Source smart browser designed to centralize professional web applications and streamline users' workflows and productivity.

  • Co-shaped the product vision around application centralization, user workflows and productivity, translating product needs into technical direction
  • Led a team of 4 developers and collaborated across product and engineering to deliver the product roadmap
  • Defined the technical vision and architecture of a complex desktop application built with web technologies
  • Designed and built an extensible platform enabling the integration and management of numerous SaaS applications
  • Developed performant user interfaces with a strong focus on usability and the overall user experience
  • Established and improved engineering practices, code quality and developer experience as the product and team scaled
  • Contributed to the development of an Open Source product and helped address the needs of its user and contributor community

Lead Developer

eFounders
Apr 2017 – Apr 2020

Lead Developer during the creation of Station, the first smart browser designed to centralize professional web applications and improve user productivity.

  • Developed the first versions of the product, from initial idea to a functional application
  • Went through Y Combinator's Winter 2018 batch (W18) with Station, followed by a $3.25M seed round led by Accel Partners
  • Designed the technical foundations and implemented the initial architecture
  • Defined development best practices and structured the codebase
  • Developed a complex desktop application based on web technologies
  • Collaborated with the product team to translate user needs into concrete features
  • Provided technical mentoring to the development team and participated in architecture and product decisions

System Architect

SOFYNE
Nov 2014 – Apr 2017

System Architect at Faurecia, leading the architecture and delivery of PLM deployment and automation solutions across large-scale industrial environments.

  • Led the architecture and delivery of automation solutions for large-scale PLM platform deployments, including Dassault 3DEXPERIENCE and Siemens Teamcenter
  • Managed a team of 4 developers, coordinating technical delivery and contributing to architectural and implementation decisions
  • Designed and developed automation frameworks that standardized and streamlined the deployment of complex PLM platforms
  • Built internal tools that improved the efficiency of architecture teams and simplified complex technical workflows
  • Automated operational and deployment tasks to improve reliability and reduce manual intervention across industrial environments
  • Collaborated with product and technical teams to define features, evaluate technical options and deliver solutions aligned with industrial constraints
  • Implemented monitoring, analysis and data management solutions to improve the operation and visibility of technical platforms

Analyst Developer

IBM Services
Nov 2010 – Oct 2014

Software developer working on the maintenance, evolution and optimization of several web platforms.

  • Corrective and evolutionary maintenance of various PHP web applications
  • Participated in the development and maintenance of the boulanger.fr e-commerce platform
  • Worked on a Java / Spring backend architecture in a high-traffic environment
  • Analyzed and optimized SQL queries to improve application performance
  • Diagnosed technical issues, improved existing codebases and improved application reliability

Projects

Bati

Creator, Lead maintainer
Apr 2023 – Present
Next-gen scaffolder generating fully-functional web apps from any combination of tools. Powers vike.dev/new.
  • Primary author with 2,000+ commits and 130+ merged pull requests; 480+ GitHub stars
  • Published on npm as create-vike, 6,500+ monthly downloads
  • Designed a compositional code-generation engine where any combination of UI framework, authentication, database, hosting and tooling yields a coherent, ready-to-run project
TypeScript Vite Vike Code generation CLI

Universal Middleware

Creator, Maintainer
May 2024 – Present
Write middleware and request handlers once, run them on Hono, Express, Fastify, Cloudflare, Vercel and more.
  • 290,000+ monthly downloads on npm
  • A single middleware definition compiled to 10+ server and edge runtime adapters
  • Serves as the interoperability layer for Vike ecosystem tooling
TypeScript Node.js Hono Express Cloudflare

Universal Deploy

Creator
Dec 2025 – Present
Zero-config deployment of any Vite app (vanilla Vite, Astro, Vike, TanStack Start...) to any platform (Netlify, Cloudflare, Vercel, self-hosted...).
  • 210,000+ monthly downloads on npm
  • Reference implementation for the Vite ecosystem deployment RFC (server entry points and routing metadata), designed in collaboration with framework and hosting-provider maintainers
  • Successor to Photon (photonjs.dev), co-created with the Vike team to unify server builds and deployment adapters
TypeScript Vite Deployment Cloudflare Netlify Vercel

vite-plugin-vercel

Creator, Maintainer
Mar 2022 – Present
Vercel adapter for Vite: packages and deploys any Vite app through the Vercel Build Output API.
  • 220,000+ monthly downloads on npm; 120+ GitHub stars; maintained continuously since 2022
  • Enables zero-config Vercel deployment for Vite-based frameworks such as Vike
TypeScript Vite Vercel Serverless Edge

Vike

Core contributor
Jun 2022 – Present
Contributor to Vike, the modular Vite-based web framework.
  • 90+ merged pull requests across Vike core and official extensions
  • Author of official extensions including vike-server (multi-runtime server integration, 15,000+ monthly npm downloads) and vike-cloudflare
TypeScript Vite SSR React Vue Solid

Quassel Webserver

Creator, Maintainer
Jul 2014 – Nov 2023
Web client and server for the Quassel IRC distributed chat system.
  • 210+ GitHub stars; maintained for nearly a decade
  • Implemented Qt's QDataStream binary serialization protocol in pure JavaScript (node-qtdatastream) and a full Quassel protocol client library (node-libquassel)
JavaScript Node.js WebSockets Binary protocols

Festival

Creator, Maintainer
Mar 2014 – Jan 2019
Self-hosted HTML5 music player with fast and efficient music library scanning, compatible with the Subsonic API.
  • Full-stack solo project: Python backend, web UI and fast filesystem-based music indexing
  • Subsonic API compatibility, making it usable from existing Subsonic mobile and desktop clients
Python HTML5 Audio streaming Subsonic API

FTPVista

Main developer
Oct 2011 – Jan 2017
Crawler that discovers FTP servers on a local network and indexes their content, with a web interface to search through the index.
  • Python crawler automatically discovering FTP servers on the local network and periodically indexing their contents
  • Full-text search web interface over the index; maintained for six years
Python JavaScript FTP Indexing Search

Education

IUT Orsay

Licentiate degree Information Technology
Until Jan 2009

IUT Orsay

IUT Information Technology
Until Jan 2008