22°16′S 166°27′E · Nouméa, New Caledonia
I’m Benoît Pouzet, a full-stack and mobile developer with 14 years of experience. I build and ship production mobile apps from New Caledonia, three hours from Australia by plane and one hour ahead of it by clock. When your team is at work, so am I.
The timezone
New Caledonia runs on UTC+11: one hour ahead of Brisbane all year, and level with Sydney over daylight saving. Every hour of your working day is an hour of mine. A question asked at 9 am gets its answer at 9 am, not tomorrow morning.
Nouméa
UTC+11
Manila / Bali
UTC+8
Delhi
UTC+5:30
Kyiv / Warsaw
UTC+2
Local 9 am to 5 pm days, shown against the east coast clock (AEST). During daylight saving, Sydney and Nouméa match to the minute. No team in India, the Philippines, Bali or Eastern Europe can sit inside your day. It is not about effort, it is geography.
The proof
Live on the App Store and Google Play in English, French and Japanese. Italofa is a guide and map for a Pacific territory where visitors lose signal as soon as they leave the capital, so the entire product is built around that constraint: places, events, search and maps all work with no network at all.
The engineering
Not a cache bolted on afterwards. The data layer is a local SQLite database, SQLCipher-encrypted, synced in the background through PowerSync, with full-text search running on-device via FTS5. On first launch the app downloads the whole map of New Caledonia as an offline pack, zoom 6 to 13 and resumable across sessions, while the database completes its initial sync in parallel.
After onboarding, flight mode is a supported state, not an error state.
These maps are not Google Maps with an API key. Vector tiles are generated from OpenStreetMap data with Planetiler and Tippecanoe. Elevation comes from the territory’s public survey DEMs, pushed through a Dockerised GDAL pipeline into Terrain-RGB tiles. Everything is served from my own TileServer-GL infrastructure: no per-request map fees for the client, no vendor lock-in, and the whole pipeline rebuilds from source data with one command.
The 3D terrain behind the headline of this page is that exact pipeline, running live.
Early on I explored on-device semantic search, the fashionable answer to helping users find things. Watching real queries made the decision for me: almost every one was geography plus dates, "what’s on near Bourail this weekend", a structured filtering problem rather than a retrieval problem. So I shipped structured filters backed by SQLite full-text search instead: smaller, faster, fully offline, and it answers the question people actually ask.
I would rather cut a fashionable feature than spend a client’s budget making one look justified. Agencies tend to find that out about a subcontractor too late; I am telling you up front.
Expo / React Native · TypeScript · TanStack · Hono · PostgreSQL + PostGIS · n8n · self-hosted (Coolify)
The arrangement
Your client, your brand, your project management. I build under your flag, invoice you, and never contact your client. The relationship stays yours.
I work in your Slack, your repo and your ticket tracker, and join standups when you run them. Async-first by default: clear written updates and small, reviewable pull requests.
Fourteen years across web and mobile. I take a feature or a whole app from spec to store submission, including the backend and infrastructure around it.
I am online before Brisbane starts. Anything you leave at the end of your day is moving again before your next coffee.
Benoît Pouzet
Freelance full-stack and mobile developer
Nouméa, New Caledonia
22°16′S 166°27′E · UTC+11
No form, no booking link, no newsletter. Email me and you will have a reply inside one Australian business day.
[email protected]
