All Posts
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Custom Training Offer
Having secured a small teaching position at the HE Vinci, I'm restarting my custom training offer. Here is a quick summary of what I can do to help upskill your team. For who ? This is mainly an offer...
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Trunk Based Development
Warning and introduction This post is a tad more technical than my usual ones. In the end, it's still about processes and even if you read this as a business person, understanding how development and...
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Why I hire Full Stack Developers and why you should too
What? I hear and read a lot about development teams efficiency - while I'm no specialist of the Theory Of Constraints, I've come to see most productivity issues as organizational in nature - much...
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You are in charge of your career
That may not be my most positive post of the year, but as far as advice go, especially toward (new) developers, this one is probably the most important: you are in charge of your career. You should...
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The One Day Work Week
One Day Work Week I'll not be talking about this idea of being able to only work a single day in the week - if you can, great for you, but I'm not there (yet?). The One Day Week I refer to is a...
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Managing people I understand
Managing people I understand Content warning: this may be (even) more philosophical than usual. What triggered those ramblings is me sharing something I often say "I cannot imagine managing a...
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Hiring strategies
Part of my octopus job is often to run a team - which sometimes means creating it, and so be in charge of hiring. While I'm no hiring specialist, I did hire around 20 developers during my career...
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2023 in review
2023 Well, that was a fun year again - and now that I look back, quite a busy one. Missions I spent more than 90% of my time at my two main customers - Beeodiversity & Farm For Good, but I'm happy...
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Short Stints
I used to be wary about "short stints" - staying less than two years at a company as an employee. I remember saying I needed three years to get at full capacity. It was not much about the...
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Seniority Reloaded
I'm by all possible measures a "Senior Developer" - at 46 years and 20+ in tech, I guess I've been one for a while. To be honest, in an industry that "seniorize" people after 5...
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I'm no rockstar, you're not Google, and that's ok
The IT sector is known for using hype and various superlative about developers: things like "Java rockstar", "Wordpress Guru" or "Front End ninja" can frequently be found...
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Just use Python
I generally don't speak much about technology - probably because they are so many people doing that already, and probably better, but mostly because I think it's generally a bad prism. As in: I'm...
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Development Team Lead Principles
I've been a "development team lead" for probably half of my career now (so about 10 to 15 years), the other half being a mixed bag of development, consultant or (gasp) C-level manager. What...
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The Last Feature
I've done a signficant number of different things in my (software) career, but I tend to generally come back to two closely related roles: "One man product team" - joining a company either...
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Give me a break with this 'quiet quitting' BS
A weird expression has appeared those last months: "Quiet Quitting". From the internet, the definition of it is something like: The term “quiet quitting” refers to employees who put no more...
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The lone freelance and his 50 colleagues
Networking matters (again) A few months ago I blogged about how networking matters - this post could be named "Networking matters, again". My previous post on this topic was about how much a...
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Try don't talk
Story Software development is full of uncertainties. Most teams I've been part of generally start development with little-known facts and a lot of unknown ones - both on the business and on the...
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A simple autonomy test
Story A middle manager at a company I was discussing with was explaining their intentions regarding their team. Among other objectives was to increase coaching done by senior people in the team and to...
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About the previous guy
A customer told me once: "That's the problem with you programmers - each time I ask one to take over the work, the first thing I hear is how the previous guy did it all wrong and everything need...
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The reluctant freelance
It has been a year now that I've played the "prototypical" role of a freelance developer - doing various missions for several clients and generally enjoying myself doing so. The fun part is...
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Don't build a F35
The setup Someone inside BigCorp (which can be a private company but also a public one or a part of an institution, governement, etc - what matters is that it's big) Bob, a manager stumble into a...
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Technology: Come to the boring side, we deliver value
Technical advisor I've been in position to give advice to early stage, usually non technical founder a significant number of time since my move in the startup world. One of the most frequent question...
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2021 Wrap Up - on the technical side
A year of technical work I blogged last week about my 2021 Wrap Up - this is also a good opportunity to look at what I've learn in this first year of "back to technical work". A few months...
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2021 Wrap Up
Back to (technical) work Leaving management My main (work) update of the year was clearly my decision to leave my job as Bluesquare's CTO. Not only I had been there for more than 5 years, but this...
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Prototype mode
Newscheck Thanks to getting some days off between two missions, I've been able to take one card of my "project idea" board and actually implement it. The result is "newscheck" - a...
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Jira - Beyond the hate of task tracking software
I've been saying "I hate Jira" several times. In meetings, in emails, probably even on Twitter. I'm far from being alone, and it has pretty much become an industry wide sentiment (or even a...
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Dear recruiter, I won't accept your invitation to connect
Dear (LinkedIn) recruiter, No, I won't accept your invitation to connect. This is not personal - it's because in my 20 years of career recruiters have been utterly useless. I guess this sounds harsh,...
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Just keep it in Excel
A few days ago I was watching a friend working in the construction sector painfully manage a 1000+ lines Excel document representing all tasks and materials to be used in a quite large construction...
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Networking matters
After a small number of long running jobs, I've been looking for work (whether missions, part time or full time) a couple of times in the last few years. While the industry is still good, I can't hide...
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Teaching React to blind students
Due to a network effect (network matters - I'll blog about that another day), I was given the opportunity to give a small React Native course to a motivated group of blind students thanks to Eqla's...
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My problem with NoSQL
I've had to work with several "NoSQL" databases those last months (I'm here speaking of using let's say Mongo or Apache Jena as the main storage of your application, not things such as...
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Teaching at Open Summer of Code (be)
I've always liked teaching/coaching, especially in my area of work. Thanks to a random tweet about Open Summer of Code looking for coach (and a timely retweet by the ever present Toon), I had the...
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Picking a blog engine in 2021
Getting back to a more varied freelance role made me want to blog again. As a good procrastinator, I decided I first needed to give my blog a lifting - toward something simpler both visually and for...
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What Twitter did for me
I was almost putting "Why I love Twitter" as the title. So: I'm not a big user (consumer or producer) of social media, but Twitter has become quite important to me, not really to amplify my...
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Looking for a job
Hi! I’ve been making software, helping people make them and leading development teams for the last 20 years. After 5 years as lead dev then CTO at Bluesquare I’m currently looking for my next...
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Integration and my parking door
I've been looking to explain a bit what integration means for developers - the kind of answer I've to give following exchanges like this: Those are separated systems Let's make an integration between...
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Make my job easier: User Stories
Second post mostly aimed at business owners. As the previous about why I won't sign your NDA, this is mainly a summary of experiences based on building various projects in the context of our upcoming...
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Why I won't sign your NDA
Since I started as a freelance beginning of this year, I had the opportunity to meet a lot of business owners, most of them in the very early stages of their venture. Most of them are coming to me to...
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A piece of advice to new developers
Third post inspired by my experience as a coach at LeWagon Bootcamp - and by some experience with hiring and working with junior developers or more precisely developers looking for their first...
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Delaying Decisions
Second post inspired by my experience as a coach at LeWagon Bootcamp. For those that missed the first, it's just there. Projects LeWagon Bootcamp program ends up with the students working in groups on...
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10% working is better than 80% not working
For the last 9 weeks, I've been working with a session of LeWagon Bootcamp students. I'm used to coach developers, but this was the first time in many years that I was coaching total beginners again,...
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Decision Making
Decisions are an integral part of a development's team work. Whether it is about priorities, methodologies, tools to use, we always have to settle on something. This is even more true for startups,...
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New Beginings!
After three good years at Pull Review, I've started as a freelance developer. Wanted to see more companies, to experiment more too. Right now, this means that I'm coaching 20 candidates-entrepreneurs...
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