// about

Senior engineer.
Indie creator. Freelancer.

I'm a Montreal-based developer with roughly twenty years of professional engineering experience. I've worked at companies like Toon Boom Animation, Nventive, Orckestra, and Gsoft leading architectural initiatives like a full monolith-to-microservices migration and I now split my time between my indie game Hard Chip and freelance consulting on backend modernization and IT infrastructure.

I work primarily in C# / .NET and HLSL (High Level Shader Language), combining distributed systems experience with real-time graphics and simulation work. That mix is rare, and it's what made building Hard Chip possible as a solo creator.

The earlier years anchored me in enterprise .NET and distributed systems (Orckestra, Nventive, Gsoft), while Toon Boom and a long thread of personal projects kept me close to graphics, simulation, and tools used by creative professionals. Hard Chip is where those two halves finally meet.

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Architectural Leadership

Planned and led a monolith to microservices transition at Gsoft, establishing a foundation the team continued building on for years.

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Solo Product Shipper

Designed, built, and launched Hard Chip as a one-person studio: game engine, digital logic simulation, HLSL (High Level Shader Language) rendering, five backend microservices, Docker infrastructure, Steam and itch.io distribution all of it.

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Performance Engineering

Deep experience profiling and tuning .NET systems under production load, and HLSL shader pipelines in real-time rendering contexts.

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Independent Consulting

Available for freelance engagements focused on modernizing legacy code and IT infrastructure. Based in Montreal, working remotely.

// current project

Live on Steam Early Access

Hard Chip

A 3D simulation and puzzle game about engineering an 8-bit processor from the ground up — starting from individual NAND (Not-AND) and NOR (Not-OR) gates, building toward registers, ALUs (Arithmetic Logic Units), and a working CPU (Central Processing Unit). No abstraction hand-holding.

Technically uncompromising: real digital logic simulation, custom 3D rendering with HLSL shaders, and a full UI (User Interface) layer all shipped solo. It's a love letter to computer architecture and the kind of game only an engineer would make.

Play on Steam hardchip.io

// screenshots

Hard Chip screenshot of processor architecture design

Hard Chip screenshot demonstrating gate-level circuit building

// built with the full stack

Hard Chip is a solo project that is not small by any measure. A 25-project solution, five backend microservices deployed as Docker containers on Linux, a custom build and packaging pipeline, and every layer implemented by one person.

25+projects in solution

5backend microservices

3build configurations

1developer

Game & Rendering

MonoGame / XNA .NET 8.0 HLSL Shaders BEPU Physics MGCB Pipeline

BEPU Physics built from modified source not the NuGet package

UI & Input

ImGui (Hexa.NET) ImPlot GumUI pure HTML + JS

Immediate-mode UI for in-game layout

Platform & Media

Facepunch.Steamworks FFmpeg (Sdcb) Obfuscar

Code obfuscated on Release publish for IP (Intellectual Property) protection

Backend Services

.net core Community Stages API Leaderboards Worker Validation Worker Validation API Data Functions MongoDB

Infrastructure

Docker (linux-x64) Compose staging/prod Private Registry Portainer Steam Depots Netlify Bucket S3 MongoDB Atlas

Build & Performance

MSBuild (custom configs) GitHub PowerShell scripts unsafe code tiered JIT disabled, self packaged Debug / Release / Server

Unsafe code and disabled tiered compilation are intentional perf settings

// engineering track record

Twenty years of backend,
performance, and systems work.

Solo Developer & Founder

Hard Chip (Elorth) · 2024 – present

Designed and shipped a technically demanding 3D logic simulation game to Steam Early Access on 2024-11-22. Full-stack ownership: engine, simulation, UX (User Experience), HA (High Availability) backend for leaderboards, marketing, and distribution.

Full-Stack & Performance Developer

Gsoft Inc. · 2016 – 2021

Acted as technological PO (Product Owner) for the Officevibe team. Led the research, planning, and execution of a monolith-to-microservices migration on Kubernetes, .NET Core, and Azure DevOps while keeping 7-year-old legacy code working. At departure, 45% of 100+ weekly deployments were running on microservices.

DevOps & Software Performance Specialist

Orckestra Inc. · 2014 – 2016

Owned performance for OCC (Orckestra Commerce Cloud), validated large Azure cloud infrastructures, and built automatic build, code analysis, and deployment pipelines.

Developer

Nventive

Cross-platform mobile and web development in a high-output consulting environment.

Developer

Toon Boom Animation Inc.

Engineering tools used in professional animation production. Early roots in graphics-adjacent domains.

Developer → Consultant → Software Architect

RunAtServer · 2011 – 2013

Shipped multiple client applications across Windows 8, Windows Phone, and Xbox 360 (Yelp, Foursquare, Box, Path, PhotoBucket, Tou.tv, others). Designed and maintained "Indeed", a shared internal framework used across the team.

Developer

Altima · 2010 · Roubaix, France

Middle office work on Commerce Server with C#, Silverlight, and WCF (Windows Communication Foundation).

Developer

3DDuo · 2009 – 2010 · Lille, France

Built the video game Leelh and its surrounding tooling on a stack of VRML, JavaScript, AJAX, PHP, Java, and DarkStar / RedDwarf.

Education

Supinfo International University

Ecole Superieure d'Informatique de Paris (France & Canada)

2006 – 2011 · International MSc (Master of Science) in Computer Science

Languages

French · native · English · professional and technical

Core technologies

C# / .NET 8 HLSL Shaders MonoGame / XNA BEPU Physics ImGui Digital Logic Simulation Real-time 3D Performance Engineering Microservices Distributed Systems Docker / Linux MongoDB Steam SDK FFmpeg MSBuild / CI Architecture Full-stack Web IT Infrastructure AI-assisted Development Agentic Workflows Claude / LLM Integration

Download Resume (PDF) →

// beyond the day job

Talks, teaching, and a long history
of side experiments.

Hard Chip didn't appear from nothing. It sits at the end of two decades of game prototypes, engine tinkering, and getting hands dirty with hardware. A short selection:

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Hardware build

Assembled a programmable 8-bit computer on breadboards from Ben Eater's design. One of the many inspirations for Hard Chip.

♬

Personal game projects

NetStorm (3D tower defense in C# on the Brume engine), Towers Grid War (2D tower defense in XNA for Xbox), M100-1 (browser strategy game), IXFramework (homemade XNA framework), Kinect World (voxel world driven by Kinect input).

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Talks & teaching

Spoke at MSDEVMTL (2012) on Kinect and its possibilities. Taught .NET courses at Supinfo (2010). Competed in Imagine Cup 2009 in the AI (Artificial Intelligence) category with Robot Sumo and Mars Rover entries.

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Engines explored

XNA, Irrlicht, SDL, Unreal Engine, UDK (Unreal Development Kit), Brume, RedDwarf / DarkStar, VRML. Most of what I learned about real-time rendering started here.

// connect