Nicolas Heron
Full-stack Developer at Sopra Steria
Lille, Hauts-de-France
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolNicolas Heron is a seasoned full-stack developer with 16+ years of experience architecting and delivering Java-based enterprise systems across healthcare, banking, insurance, retail and public-sector projects. He is a long-time Drools committer and contributor to Kogito/Drools runtimes, improving rule engine suggestion completion, enum/generic support and test robustness for widely used open-source business automation tooling. Nicolas blends deep rule-engine and decision automation expertise (Drools, OptaPlanner) with modern Java ecosystems (Spring Boot, JPA, Kafka, Docker) and hands-on architecture work from ESB/SOA to cloud-native services. He has founded and led multiple teams and companies, co-founded a local Java User Group, and co-funded the OpenESB community, demonstrating both technical leadership and grassroots open-source advocacy. Notably, he has applied rule and planning engines to high-scale, user-facing systems (100k+ users recommendation service, national police interoperability program) and continues to bridge core engine internals with production integration. Based in Lille, France, Nicolas combines deep legacy and cutting-edge experience, making complex decision systems maintainable and production-ready.
16 years of coding experience
26 years of employment as a software developer
EseoMaster, Artificial Intelligence in computer science, Master, Artificial Intelligence in computer science at Université de Caen NormandieInstitution Saint Pierre, Caen
English, German
Stackoverflow
21reputation
948reached
5answers
0questions
Github Skills (10)
javas10
junit10
drools10
dmn10
java10
rule-engine10
testing10
bpmn9
mvel9
kie6
Programming languages (4)
Github contributions (5)
apache/incubator-kie-kogito-runtimes
Sep 2009 - Dec 2010
Kogito Runtimes - Kogito is a cloud-native business automation technology for building cloud-ready business applications.
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:12 commits in 1 year 3 months
Contributions summary:Nicolas primarily contributed to the Drools and Guvnor projects within the repository. Their work involved modifying core Java code related to suggestion completion engines, class field inspection, and enum support. These changes included enhancing the handling of parameterized types, adding support for enums within the suggestion completion engine, and improving the testing framework. The user also addressed issues related to MVEL expressions and collection handling within the testing scenarios.
kogitoknativebusiness-automationrule-enginedrools
apache/incubator-kie-drools
Sep 2009 - Dec 2010
Drools is a rule engine, DMN engine and complex event processing (CEP) engine for Java.
Role in this project:Backend Developer
Backend DeveloperContributions:12 commits in 1 year 3 months
Contributions summary:Nicolas primarily focused on enhancing the Drools rule engine's functionality. Their contributions involved modifying the suggestion completion engine to support enums and generic types within rules, improving the guided editor. These changes included adding new features for handling collections and data type suggestions, with related updates to test cases. The user's work directly impacted the usability and feature set of the Drools platform.
droolsbusiness-rulesdmn-engineevent-processingcomplex-event-processing
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