Background
My name is Olivier Gorzalka. I have been building for the web since 2007 — first in agencies, then on my own, and today at the head of AmphiBee. What hasn’t changed in 19 years: I still write code.
2007
Paris, Cosmic Communication
I started in the web team of a full-service communications agency in Paris. A little over three years, on projects for Renault, BNP Paribas, Thermor and Essilor. You learn quickly what a large account means: long cycles, sign-off after sign-off, and the obligation that it works on the day it has to.
2010
Back north, Terre de Café
Back to northern France. Hired as a front-end developer, I left as technical project manager, having steered the agency through its move into e-commerce. E-commerce changes the nature of the work: a brochure site gets delivered, a shop gets maintained. You have to hold stock, orders and payments, and know what to do when it breaks on a Saturday. That is where I moved from building pages to designing systems.
2015
On my own, as behaba
In mid-2015 I went freelance. I worked as a subcontractor for agencies and directly for end clients: WordPress, WooCommerce, front-end, visual identity. Three years doing everything, which remains the best school for working out later what you want to delegate and what you want to keep.
2018
AmphiBee
I went into partnership with the directors of Adexos, a Magento agency, to found AmphiBee. I am its chairman and technical director: I set the technical direction, run research and quality control, and look after the teams — including the HR side, the part of the job that gets talked about least and takes the most time.
Hugo Bailleul joined as a business developer on a work-study contract, in the agency’s earliest days. He is a partner today, and a good share of what AmphiBee has become is down to him.
2022
RuBee
The holding company, set up in March. It owns AmphiBee, holds a minority stake in Agence Onze, the SEO agency led by Lucio Laria, and provides the frame for whatever falls outside the agency.
Today
What keeps me busy
Two projects. The first is Pollora, a framework that runs WordPress inside Laravel. It came out of the problems you hit while shipping sites, and it is published under a free licence.
The second is artificial intelligence and automation. I am less interested in making a demonstration of it than in an tool that solves a specific problem: context handed to agents so they work cleanly on our repositories, AI-assisted translation, MCP connectors, visibility for the engines that now read the web differently. And a great many automated tasks that never needed a human.
It is the same rule as it has been for 19 years, and it holds for AI as for everything else: start from the problem, never from the tool. An elegant solution that fixes nothing does not interest me.
Alongside
Civic work
I am attached to my town of Angres, in northern France. I built the website of Ensemble pour Bâtir Demain, I keep it running, and I take part in the group’s communications — as a volunteer. A way of putting these skills to work for local civic life. Read more.