I’m Oumar Konaté, a computer engineer and Software Craftsman with more than 17 years of experience building complex, business-critical web applications. I work as a Senior Full-Stack Web Developer across the PHP/Symfony, React and Node.js ecosystems, and I now focus a large part of my energy on AI tooling — designing MCP (Model Context Protocol) servers and automating real engineering work with AI assistants such as Claude Code. My north star is the same it has always been: shipping quality software through clean architecture, testing and continuous improvement.

What I do today

Since January 2022 I work as a senior developer and consultant at Le Figaro in Paris, building and maintaining the back office of its web platforms with PHP 8, Symfony 5, React/Redux, Elasticsearch and MariaDB — applying Domain-Driven Design, CQRS and Hexagonal Architecture in an agile (Scrum) team.

A recent highlight of that work: leading the migration of the editorial CMS’s custom CKEditor 5 rich-text editor — 82 plugins in total, 46 of them built in-house — from version 26 to version 47.3, while preserving full feature parity for the newsrooms. I industrialized that migration with a dedicated MCP audit tool (open-sourced as ckeditor_audit) and a reproducible test harness, and I contribute to strangling the platform’s legacy Symfony monolith toward a DDD / hexagonal / CQRS architecture, bounded context by bounded context.

Outside of client work I build and maintain open-source MCP servers that connect AI assistants to real systems (code search, WordPress management, plugin migration audits), and I write about agentic content pipelines, token optimization and software craftsmanship on this blog.

Core expertise

  • Architecture: Domain-Driven Design (DDD), CQRS, Hexagonal Architecture, SOLID principles, design patterns.
  • Backend: PHP (4 → 8), Symfony 2/3/4/5, Doctrine & Propel, REST APIs, OAuth2 & OpenID Connect.
  • Editorial tooling & CKEditor 5: custom CKEditor 5 plugin architecture (model/view/schema, upcast/downcast converters), large-scale version migrations (v26 → v47.3, 82 plugins), migration tooling and integration/E2E test harnesses.
  • Frontend: React/Redux, native JavaScript (ES6), SASS with BEM, Atomic Design, Twig, Webpack.
  • Real-time systems: WebSocket / Socket.io, Redis pub/sub, horizontal scaling with PM2, MongoDB/Mongoose, newswire feed ingestion (XML/XSLT).
  • Data & infrastructure: Elasticsearch, Redis, RabbitMQ, MariaDB/MySQL, PostgreSQL, Docker, Nginx.
  • Quality & testing: TDD, PHPUnit, Mocha/Chai/Sinon, PHPStan, PHP-CS-Fixer, PHPMD, GrumPHP.
  • AI tooling: Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers, Python, Claude Code automation.
  • SEO: technical SEO and search positioning on Google and Bing.

Experience

  • Le Figaro — Senior Web Developer / Consultant (since 2022). Back office of Le Figaro’s web platforms. Stack: PHP 8, Symfony 5, React/Redux, Elasticsearch, MariaDB; DDD, CQRS, Hexagonal Architecture. Led the migration of 82 CKEditor 5 plugins (46 built in-house) from v26 to v47.3 with full feature parity, industrialized via a custom MCP audit tool and a real-editor integration + Playwright E2E test harness; contributed to strangling the legacy monolith toward 11 DDD/hexagonal bounded contexts, enforced by Deptrac and PHPStan level 10; also designed a scalable real-time WebSocket back-end (Socket.io + Redis pub/sub, PM2) ingesting Reuters newswire feeds into Elasticsearch.
  • COFRAC (French Accreditation Committee) — Senior Web Developer / Consultant (2021). Single sign-on portal and a flexible-scope management platform; built an OpenID Connect server (Authorization Code Flow) on top of OAuth2; code-quality tooling and unit tests.
  • France Télévisions — Senior Web Developer / Consultant (2017–2020). The france.tv video platform, France’s leading media site: migration to Symfony 4, refactoring, Atomic Design reskin, accessibility kick-off, in a 7-developer team.
  • Bouygues Telecom — Senior Web Developer / Consultant (2017). User-analytics module for the BACADEMIE platform.
  • Atexo — Web Developer → Technical Project Manager → Senior Web Developer (2008–2017). The MPE public-procurement software used by the French, Moroccan and Luxembourg administrations; REST APIs over INSEE/SGMAP reference data; Symfony 2/3 migrations.

Open-source & projects

  • hexagonal-architecture — a reference example of Hexagonal Architecture in a modern, framework-free MVC PHP project.
  • ckeditor_audit — a read-only MCP server that audits the migration status of custom CKEditor plugins, built to industrialize the Le Figaro v26 → v47.3 migration.
  • project_search — a local MCP server providing fast file and code search, designed to save AI tokens by returning only paths and snippets.
  • wordpress_manager — an MCP server exposing a WordPress site to any MCP-compatible AI assistant through the WordPress REST API.
  • ckeditor5-simple-space — a dependency-free CKEditor 5 plugin that reveals simple spaces with a toolbar toggle, published on npm (born from CKEditor issue #1700). Read the write-up.

More of my work is on GitHub and LinkedIn.

Education & languages

  • Specialized Master’s in Computer Science, INSA Lyon (2008) — Information Systems.
  • Master’s degree in Physics — Electronics option.
  • Languages: French (native), English (technical / professional reading & writing).

Frequently asked questions

Who is Oumar Konaté?

Oumar Konaté is a senior full-stack web developer and software craftsman based near Paris, France, with 17+ years of experience. He works at Le Figaro and builds open-source AI tooling (MCP servers) in his own time.

What technologies does he specialize in?

Primarily PHP and Symfony (2 to 5) on the backend, React/Redux and JavaScript on the frontend, plus Node.js and Python. He has strong experience with CKEditor 5 plugin development and version migrations, Elasticsearch, Redis, RabbitMQ, Docker, and architecture practices such as DDD, CQRS, Hexagonal Architecture and TDD.

What was his CKEditor 5 migration project at Le Figaro?

He led the migration of Le Figaro’s editorial rich-text editor — 82 CKEditor 5 plugins in total, 46 of them built in-house — from version 26 to version 47.3, preserving full feature parity for the newsrooms. The effort was industrialized with a custom MCP audit tool (open-sourced as ckeditor_audit) and a test harness combining real-editor integration tests with Playwright end-to-end coverage.

What is an MCP server, and what has he built?

An MCP (Model Context Protocol) server lets AI assistants like Claude securely use external tools and data. Oumar has built several open-source ones, including project_search (code search), wordpress_manager (WordPress via REST) and ckeditor_audit (plugin-migration auditing).

Is he available for consulting?

Oumar has worked as a consultant for major organizations including Le Figaro, France Télévisions, COFRAC and Bouygues Telecom. You can reach out through the contact page.