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About me

Hi! I’m Yacine Bekka. Welcome to my personal page, where I gather my projects, my writing and whatever I happen to be tinkering with.

My path (short version)

• I start out at 16 as an apprentice, selling motorbikes and scooters at a dealership in the Paris suburbs.
• Two years later I walk away with a vocational diploma in sales (a French Bac Pro Commerce).
• I bounce between odd retail jobs (including the accessories/leather-goods floor at Printemps Parly 2, if you know, you know).
• One thing leads to another and I land a temp contract as an SAP data analyst at Unilever France.
• From there I move to Bio-Rad Laboratories, then to Alstom as a data manager (more technical architecture than managing people)
• After ~2 years at Alstom, I go freelance and work with a range of clients (Groupe SeLoger, Technip Energies, and others).

At some point I want to understand the technical side more deeply, not just the tools, but the math underneath. So I decide to go back to school, and quickly realize the French education system isn’t really built for adults retraining mid-career. I set my sights across the Atlantic instead, where I can rebuild the whole thing from the ground up through distance learning: a bachelor’s in math, then a master’s in data science. I wrap all this up in March 2026, and I’m currently figuring out what’s next (a few things are already in motion, but I don’t want to get ahead of myself… shh).

In the meantime, I read, I write, and I build small side projects for fun (and profit).

Education

• M.Sc. Data Science — University of Colorado Boulder
• B.A. Mathematics — Southern New Hampshire University

Off-screen

• Sport addict: did a fair amount of climbing when I was younger (competing, even), some rugby (in high school) and combat sports (karate, muay thai, also tried MMA in 2025). I still keep a running + lifting base to stay in shape.

• Films and reading: I really like Guy Ritchie for his dry humour (Snatch; Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels). I’m not a heavy reader but I very much enjoyed Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago. I also sometimes listen to reruns of Henri Guillemin’s radio broadcasts on French history, which I find first-rate.

My projects

Autonomous Yahtzee agent — a Monte-Carlo Tree Search agent that plays Yahtzee, fully in-browser (no backend). Play against it, or use it for move-by-move hints.

Play · Read the report · Source

Option pricer (binomial tree) — CRR pricing for European / American options, in JavaScript in the browser.

Launch the pricer · Code (Python)

→ More projects in the portfolio.

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