Career review

INstitut Supérieur d'Informatique Appliquée (INSIA)

09/30/2002–present day

I arrived at INSIA right when it was being overhauled into an IT college with heavy internships, in order to help shape it up and make it grow (it used to be a small-time general-purpose engineering secondary school with about a hundred students).

When I got in, my colleagues Emmanuel le Chevoir and Adrien Urban had been there for a month, working like crazy on the IT infrastructure for the “new INSIA”. We constituted the CTO office and, in many respects, the dean office.

Within two months, we had to setup the whole school, from the machine labs to the curricula. We taught most of the technical courses, for which course material had to be produced. 70-hour weeks were pretty commonplace.

Today (November 2005), after more than a few restructurations and a few relocations to boot (sigh), plus yearly adjustments to the curricula, INSIA provides quality (and, sometimes, even world-class) teaching to 400+ students over five years. The two last years offer three majors: Software Engineering (SIGL), Networking and Systems Administration (SRT) and Embedded Systems (TRSE).

As for me, I'm a co-CTO and sort of the dean of the Software Engineering department. More informally, I'm quite often in charge of in-house software projects.

I teach Delphi in freshman year, C++ in senior year, and all classes Java-related (mostly in Masters): J2SE and J2EE, which I strive to keep at the cutting edge of those technologies, and which are part of those courses for which (or so I like to believe) INSIA stands ahead of most other French IT colleges.

Monthly presentations are scheduled for sweet technologies which cannot make it to the curriculum for lack of time, scope or current industry demand. This year (2005/2006), I will likely hold sessions on XML-XSL/T, Qt4, Ruby and Rails.

Freelance software architect

10/01/2001–09/29/2002

Once the Posse was over, I didn't feel at all like joining a company that would, the way I looked at it, necessarily feel less interesting, less fun, less of a boost. The Comvivial project was sitting there, awkwardly awaiting completion. Yan Pierre le Luyer was getting in touch with me about an architect job on what was to become Spectaculaire!™… I decided to do some software architecture, freelance.

I still don't really know whether, eventually, I wouldn't have been better off doing something else, or at least better picking my projects.

I worked from home, in the 960+sq.ft apartment with two roommates on rue des Messageries. It was great, but not being able to gather outside technical review also means I'm not always proud of what I delivered, especially in hindsight.

Earning money thanks to these two projects, I didn't register with unemployment services right off (in France, such services pay you a significant part of your recently-terminated salary for up to a year after job termination, provided that you demonstrate efforts to get a new job). The Posse had shut down in November, I finally applied in April. I did not always work regularly, and I ended up paying for it, getting bogged down in hugely overloaded weeks, creating stress so high it had physical impacts (such as shingles the week before getting Spectaculaire! online). Comvivial saw its deadline zoom by, and I didn't get paid for the extra time.

In the meantime, the person running Spectaculaire!™ was taking the architecture I had designed, capable of powering a site as rich as IMDb, and was turning it into a web portal barely better than a personal homepage.

Eventually, I made about FRF80,000 (at the time about US$13K) for 8 months of work, which accounted to about 1,600 man-hours. Even in France, for freelance work, that's just laughable. The tax rate alone meant I had made barely more than the minimum legal salary in a corporate context.

The gist of it is that I was disappointed by this experience. Still, I learnt a few useful things along the way, and got my feet more firmly on the ground, so I'm glad I gave it a shot. I just wasn't ready. Maybe one day I'll go freelance again…

Posse42

07/01/2000–09/30/2001

Ain't it just Heaven! To this very day, every February 11th (42nd day of the year), most former employees gather up at one of the cofounder's, Guy Wiriath, to celebrate the memory of this company.

Founded on February 11, 2000 by 21 associates, the Posse42 aimed to crystalize the know-how, the means and the personal experiences around varied projects, generaly revolving around the Web. We were right in the middle of the Internet Bubble, and Posse42 did not have the financial traits of a start-up: no long-teeth wolflike founders, no vaporware, no outrageous fundraising, no cash-burning.

Entirely self-financed, with extra funds coming through customer-driven projects, with all its employees being paid the same salary (and a pretty low one at that!), using crystal-clear operational processes both in-house and with customers, Posse42 had about 10 permanent employees and up to half a dozen interns (paid about ¼ of the base salary). During job interviews, the question kept coming up, surprising and bold: “if we hire you, what do you really want to do?”

Posse42 had two wholly-owned subsidiaries: FridayWare handled several web sites, including the popular MaxiChat and the work-in-progress named Minissimo, a select, carefully-worded and reviewed directory of web sites; the second subsidiary was MP3Soleil, the first 100%-digital music label in France, if not in Europe.

We worked in close partnership (about 10 feet away) with the excellent web agency Aeternet, that was responsible for several award-winning sites, most famously the movie site for Amélie.

Talent and energy were bubbling about. You came to work humming. 18 fabulous months, 18 amazing, astounding months. In order to join this adventure, many of the employees had ditched juicy-income jobs, often paid twice or three times as much, in safe-size companies. We worked at a sort of Web development Xanadu.

Summer and Fall 2001 saw a remarkable series of bad lucks happen, and while we finally needed to raise funds in order to grow enough for honoring recently-obtained contracts, we saw ourselves in a dead-end. Instead of entering the infamous vicious circle of insufficient funding, the team favored the clean stop option, with no debts anywhere.

None Networks

05/25/1999–12/20/1999

In May 1999, during the lunch that closed the Finals of Prologin (French national programming contest), Guy Wiriath, a founder of the contest, had been freshly appointed project manager for the development of the upcoming web portal Freesbee.fr. He came to have lunch and pick up a “Dream Team.” The portal was to open with great pomp on June 15, thus launching the first “free” ISP in France. When Guy got onboard, strictly nothing had been done about it.

The next day, Sébastien Carlier, Mathias Hiron and yours truly went through a tour of their installations, and boy did we end up drooling all over ourselves. We were very impressed with the workplace at large, but most specifically with their server rooms. We agreed to develop the portal, signed a sweet contract, and headed off into 3 of the craziest coding weeks I've ever been through.

We showed up at about 4pm, and left around 8am. Having first settled smack in the middle of the marketing open space, on the 3rd floor, we were rather easy to spot. Having Sébastien among us was truly the key to our success.

We had to provide a modular architecture for the portal, entirely based on servlets and JSP, two J2EE technologies that were, at the time, still beta! No portal in Europe dared use it for production purposes yet. Very little assistance was available. Even the servers were beta, as were many other software components (e.g. CRM). We spent our nights designing the architecture and implementing like men possessed. Data streams came from 15+ partners (AFP, Météo France, Sport24, to name but a few), in widely different, proprietary formats (that mostly sucked), and with haphazard frequencies.

June 15 came around, and during the morning press conference, the prototype was working. At the evening mega launch party (titanic budget, out-of-this-world vibes), the site was online.

Sébastien stayed in July to help me redesign the whole thing with a bit of hindsight and much cooler heads. I stayed until December, on a two-days-a-week basis (having allotted 4 to Cogisoft and one to college), in order to spew out a 2.0 and transfer skills over to the relay team.

Deep pockets, sweet salary, international team packed with brilliant minds, quicksilver-heavy constraints and insane deadlines, project with a definite sexy air about it: it's just a great memory!

Borland (USA)

10/01/1998–01/15/1999

Boy did I love every minute of it! I went through hell to finally get this job at Borland's HQ in Scotts Valley, CA. I all but harassed Charlie Calvert, then Anneke Leigh by e-mail. I went through two phone interviews with Anders Ohlsson (Tech) and Christopher Jones (Management). I filled up tons of paperwork with CIEE and the US ambassy. But man, this was worth it!

Working there felt, to me, much like being a simple mortal suddenly walking the summit of Mount Olympus. My colleagues had written books I had read, or even translated for France. On the second floor, doors had plaques that spelled names such as Charles Jazdzewski, Danny Thorpe, Bruneau Babet… It could as well have been Zeus, Apollo and Hermes. These guys were my personal Gods.

The good side is, I had come to feel seriously self-possessed in France, and that slapped me right back to reality, helping me find a nice dose of humility. On the other hand, I felt so motivated I worked like a madman and started stringing up a few in-house records.

After landing at Delphi DS, I was monitored for barely 2 days, then promoted to Tier 1 without going through the Up and Running stage. I was chartered with creating the in-house Delphi Interns Training on my second day, and moved to Tier 2 (which just had 3 members when I got in) after barely a month, when I hear the average time was about 18 months. A few weeks later, I started hanging out with the R&D team, then contributing a bit. To this day, I still have e-mail chats with Danny Thorpe, Borland's Chief Sciencist, most notably in charge of the compiler, and responsible for the design of the VCL core plumbing. Danny spew out a full Linux port of the Delphi compiler barely a year after having booted his first Linux. Ouch.

So fear not, for since then, I never allow me to forget there are, no kidding, so many people so much more brilliant than I (honest! Just look at Ben Goodger or David Heinemeier Hansson, it's just creepy!) Still, working with these guys looks like a career objective in itself :-)

Cogisoft

01/16/1996–06/30/2000

I joined Cogisoft on January 16, 1996. In the evening. This was my first true company, my first real job (even if it happened through a non-stop series of internships).

When I got in, all I knew about Delphi was its name; still, I had 4 intensive years of Turbo-Pascal under my belt, and was used to object-oriented programming. Cogisoft was then leader on Borland products on the French market, and in many respects on the European market. Julien Brunet had noticed me at EPITA (my IT college). I started small, giving a hand on the Bodet project (Bodet specializes in time management: corporate badges, railroad/airport clocks and timekeeping, etc.). Becoming Julien's assistant, I quickly dived into developing Delphi components. In just a few months, I was a full member of the team and developed a heck of a lot.

I then starting teaching training courses, another major activity of the company. I started with the Borland-certified courses, and moved on to more advanced sessions on database development and component design.

The next Fall, I started working a lot with Jérôme Vollet. Microsoft was launching the COM technology, and Jérôme was entrusting me with the R&D to produce a RDBMS component set for lightweight client programs, using COM to access a business tier server. Internally, we were actually developing the equivalent of what would, almost a year later, be Delphi 3's DataBroker. That's when I really started to love the job. I was a shadow at school, pale with too many nights spent developing until 3am or more. I was nineteen.

On November 4, 1997, I had gained enough status to be entrusted with the two main sessions Cogisoft held at the Borland Developers Conference for France (BorCon97-Fr), which took place at Cap15, right at the foot of the Eiffel Tower. I held each session twice (once a day). The first one got deep into the subtleties of Cached Updates, but the real kicker was the second session: it dived deep, real deep, into the inner workings of the still-hot-from-the-oven DataBroker. At that point, just about nobody in Europe knew what laid behind the magic. Heck, very few even knew what the DataBroker could actually do. There was no book in French, and very few in English.

On the first day, I got a sizeable audience. On the second, the conference room was packed: people standing, people sitting in the alleys, kneeling before the stage, peeping from the doors… Regular Delphi book authors were attending, as well as Charlie Calvert, Borland's Developer Relations manager. Standing ovation at session end. The day before, the French translation of Delphi 3 Unleashed had gone out, which Christophe Menet and I had performed technical edition for. My name was on the cover. I was 20 years old.

It is precisely for such moments that “Cogi” was an outstanding experience. The R&D vibes kicked ass. We were really cutting-edge, and my skills just kept growing.

In 1998, I spent most of my time co-writing new training manuals with Christophe Menet, dealing with advanced topics (mostly around Client/Server stuff and component design), teaching sessions (I have 3,000+ hours as a trainer behind me), and working on various R&D projects. On September 29, I was flying to San Francisco, in order to spend 14 weeks working at Borland's HQ (see previous section).

When I came back, I did not return to Cogisoft before July, when I started to gradually work again with them. In September, as I was considering settling in Santa Cruz and working full-time at Borland's R&D, the CEO of Cogisoft, Ivan Becerril, promised me the moon with the technology we were focusing all our R&D on: Delos. He swore I'd evangelize in the US. I stayed.

From then, it's all been downhill. Delos was doing great, I certainly took particular care of that, being in charge of over half its modules. But the promises kept vanishing into thin air as they were replaced by yet more promises. With other members of the R&D, we started looking into the guts of the company, and didn't quite like what we saw. I won't go into details, but very quickly, we agreed through encrypted e-mails to leave the company soon, our personal ethics being rather edgy at what we saw growing. I would leave when my internship was complete, on June 30. They would leave during the summer. When he learnt I was about to leave (a full month in advance, when I told him), Ivan entered into a fit not unlike Steve Ballmer's infamous chair-throwing. I would be denied my salary that month (about US$3,000). When other pillars of R&D left, in July and August, Cogisoft's activity ground to a halt, long enough for them to refill with naive interns.

And today, you can still read wonders about e-Delos. That it's a US company (hey, just go see for yourself!), filled with great people (Kee Wee and John Colomb, for instance: just subtract one from each initial and think for a moment); that we're at version 10 or higher of e-Delos (who cares if the US site stalls since 2000, that is, since I last touched it, and that e-Delos' entire activity is at their “exclusive retailer” Delos France, whose URL is cogisoft.fr).