Who would’ve believed that ? While the vaccination campaign against Covid-19 is in full swing in France, one of the most popular initiatives of the moment in the fight against the coronavirus, Vitemadose, was imagined – on a voluntary basis moreover – not by the State, but by a young 25-year-old computer engineer, Guillaume Rozier.
Built in three days, its online search engine, which allows you to find a niche for getting vaccinated near your home in one click, has established itself since its launch on 1er April, as a reference for many French people looking for vaccine doses. Every day, they are on average 1 million to use it, on the lookout for an appointment. “ To my amazement, the mayonnaise set right from the start. The first version was far from perfect », Wonders this geek passionate about data. His initiative, judged by many public utility, arouses such enthusiasm that some are demanding that he be awarded the Legion of Honor.
The engineer – now a consultant at Octo Technology, an IT consulting firm in Paris – still struggles to believe in the notoriety he enjoys. Since the fall of 2020, his phone has not stopped ringing. He makes a series of appearances on television sets, radio broadcasts and interviews in the press. “It all happened almost in spite of myself. I did not anticipate or plan anything ”, he explains. Before setting up Vitemadose, the Savoyard had already distinguished himself by creating, from the first weeks of the pandemic, the CovidTracker website, where he publishes daily graphs to follow his progress in France and around the world.
Unmissable reference
The young man was then a student at Télécom Nancy, a computer engineering school, where he studied big data. He had just started his end-of-studies internship in Luxembourg when he realized ” out of curiosity “, on March 5, its first graph on the number of new cases of Covid-19 in France and Italy. “I realized that we were following exactly the same route as Italy, with a delay of a few days He remembers.
Without delay, he sends his discovery to his family and friends, then posts it on the social network Twitter. The effect is viral. Hundreds, then thousands of people are asking for new statistics. Faced with demand, the engineer – who did not then “Never wrote a line of code for a website” – launches a web page, where it compiles all its curves. The success is there, but it is still modest.
You have 54.83% of this article to read. The rest is for subscribers only.