My name is François Fournier. I am a fractional CTO.
Twenty five years in tech: SaaS, scale-ups, architecture audits. What I do now fits in one sentence — I come in when the engineering team is stuck, I decide, and I leave when it’s done.
What makes this different
I built a fablab in rural France, a social-economy incubator. A shared workshop in a village of less than two thousand people, with a total budget of €23,000 and a team of volunteers.
What I learned there wasn’t technical. It was that governing a project with no hierarchy and no margin for error demands more rigour than governing a funded startup. Co-development, the check-in round, open space, consent-based decision-making: tools I now use in executive committees, and that work better than most of the frameworks sold for fifty thousand euros.
It is the least expected bridge in my career, and it became the way I work.
I teach
Undergraduate computer science. Not for the CV — to stay honest.
Twenty five years in tech gives you certainties, and gradually you confuse “what I learned” with “what is true”. Students break that, because they ask the questions nobody asks any more. Every semester I leave with fewer assumptions than I arrived with.
This blog
The Signal is the English companion to Le Signal, where most of my writing lives. Expect it to fill slowly.
What goes in it: what I see on engagements and what it costs. The debt you choose versus the debt you inherit. AI projects that never needed AI. Governance that decides, and governance that meets.
Numbers where I have them. Without numbers where I don’t, and I say so.