Palad / Hacker Ouvert

Python back-end developer at Pallad, a Montpellier cybersecurity company (audit, diagnosis, compliance and training), founded in 2024 by two former Devensys engineers. I joined for a four-month internship to build their main technical project, Hacker Ouvert, and worked on its back-end from when it was little more than an idea.

Hacker Ouvert

Hacker Ouvert is a platform to make cybersecurity accessible to students and professionals through lessons, hands-on labs and certifications. It grew out of a community first started as an association in 2017 (a Discord for sharing security knowledge and job opportunities), then school workshops, and now a full product.

What I built

I designed and built the entire back-end (Django) and parts of the front-end. The core idea is that courses and labs can be authored on the fly and stored in the database:

• Labs described in JSON,
• Courses written in Markdown,
• both rendered dynamically on the front-end.

Labs are secured so learners can’t reach the answers.

Infrastructure & workflow

Pallad favours French-made and open-source tooling, so everything is hosted on Scaleway, with infrastructure described as code in Terraform (a dedicated tf-ho repo) and run via Docker / docker-compose. The platform is split across several repositories: front-end, back-end, a meta-repo of submodules, and a Discord bot, with a standard main / develop GitHub flow and peer-reviewed pull requests.

The full internship report is embedded below.

My role

Back-end developer (4-month internship): architecture, the Django back-end, parts of the front-end, and infrastructure.

Tech

Python · Django · Scaleway · Terraform · Docker