2017 has been quite a busy year and 2018 will be at least as lively!

A new job

In April 2017 I decided to quit my current job at Sqreen where I was working on their Python agent. I had an amazing time working on a ground-breaking technology with brilliant friends. If you haven’t tested their product yet, I can only urge you to try it!

But when my dearest friend Pierre-Yves gave me the opportunity to work on open-source projects remotely as a consultant, I decided to take the opportunity to improve my life style and join him.

I now work at Octobus where we do Mercurial consulting, bug squashing, performance optimization, and training. I’m discovering how much good developer tools can help businesses, the delight of being part of an open-source community and meeting fascinating people.

I’m enjoying rediscovering Mercurial, the first modern DVCS I used, way before moving to the dark-side of DVCS: Git. I’ve also discovered and started contributing to Evolve, the game-changing extension Pierre-Yves has been working on for several years. Think distributed safe history rewriting. Yes, that means that you could now rebase some commits while your colleague squash other ones, push everything (don’t use the force Luke) and ends up with a nice history without conflict. Sounds amazing, right? It’s very powerful and could launch Mercurial into a brand new generation of DVCS.

You don’t use Mercurial? We also do Python/Python performance/Testing consulting if you ever need help.

A new life

Having the opportunity to work remotely from home pushed my wonderful girlfriend and me to start looking for a house to buy, away from Paris.

We found our perfect house in Picardie (about 90km from Paris) just before the summer. It is in the countryside but we still have public transportation to go to Paris, we have a big garden and no noises from the road anymore! That’s a big improvement and our cat is loving it!

To top it off, I have a separate building where I’ve set up my office, it’s very important when working remotely to have a separate room to mark the distinction between work and private life. I’ve got a nice setup with a USC-C Dock screen, more details about it in a follow-up blog post.

We also decided to enter a Civil Union, to make our relationship official under the law. To mark this important step, we got rings, but not traditional ones: rings that matched our common values. It took some time but finally found what we were looking for, on Etsy in the EireEcoRing shop. The rings we choose are made from old coins and recycled wood. They are beautiful and were exactly what we were looking for!

After months of preparation, we finally moved in September with the help of many friends and family members. We cannot thank them enough!

We are still settling in but one of the most important things is checked from the list: the optical fiber is installed and I now have a better Internet connection than when I was living in Paris.

The house is old and rustic but no urgent work is upcoming. I get a few stuff to fix but our next project is to install Ethernet all around the house. I’ve got a few plan on how to do it and I will make a blog post about how it goes.

2018

My most important objective of 2018 is to make the Evolve extension ready for prime-time. Ship it to people, communicate about it, teach how to use it, gather feedback from users. It has the possibility to revolutionize the DVCS industry, but only if users know about it. If you want to try it, feel free to ping me (mail/twitter/…) and I will give you some literature you can start with.

I also have ambitious personal projects for 2018! It’s still a bit secret but it will be about software testing, I’ve got some ideas and projects with good feedback so far, so stay tuned for a future blog post about it.

I will be at Fosdem in February, ping me if you are passionate about software testing and want to chat!

As you’ve read so far, here is a glimpse at what I’m working on: