Seven years inside Odoo, building for its customers

The situation#

Odoo's own services team takes the implementations where the standard product does not fit the customer's business. I worked in it for seven years, employed at first and then, from the founding of avanserv, as a subcontractor. The customers were Odoo's, not mine, which is why none of them is named here.

What I did#

Most of the work was custom development: the modules that close the gap between what Odoo does and what a given business needs. Then the upgrades, more than twenty of them, carrying a customer's data and customisations from one version of Odoo to the next.

As a team lead I ran a group of up to ten developers, reviewing their code and releasing it to production. As a tech lead I carried the technical decisions for teams of up to eight on a single project. The largest of those projects served hundreds of users and went live in several phases, each one a rollout of its own.

On those projects the work went past the code. I ran performance analyses and load tests before go-live, so a system that worked for ten testers would also hold under hundreds of users, and deployed Odoo both on Odoo.sh and on customers' own servers. Along the way I trained customers and partners on Odoo development, more than ten times.

What the figures rest on#

My own record. None of it can be rebuilt from a system I still have access to, so every figure is a floor with its plus sign, an order of magnitude rather than a count.