About this website

I have never been very good at maintaining websites. However, as I sometimes feel the need to write (sorry about that), I once decided that keeping an online repository would help. Of course it does not: it has been fun (and time-consuming) when I had the leisure to roll my own software for the task, and boring at best when I tried to use other people’s soup.

So, I guess that this is the N-th attempt, using a great piece of software named hakyll which sits on the fine line between DIY and not my business.

Finally, this site helps me a lot to keep in touch with family and friends. As I live away from most of them for months at a time, and not all can afford to travel to Mexico, France, or wherever we are.

About the author

I’m a French guy, sharing my life between France and Mexico with my wife and kid. Currently I am in: Oaxaca, Mexico.

I have been selling my services as a software engineer for some years now, that means I understand how everything went so wrong, not necessarily how to fix it. I enjoy making things with computers and that’s still how I spend most of my time!

I’ve worked remotely for years, but I can assure you that I like to meet people. :)

Computers

Curiosity is the main reason I’m into computers, and also a sense of practicality: I like to (re-)program things around me to do whatever I want. Not always what the vendor thought would be nice. This is sadly less and less permitted by hardware and software vendors, and so requires more patience and skills than it should, but we can still have tons of fun.

If you’ve ever had to replace a battery in an appliance, a broken phone screen, or modify retail electronics, you know how this sucks. We must improve that in order to be free, and produce less waste.

I’m using this

My computer is a small Dell XPS 13, it’s running Archlinux which I have no strong feelings about. It’s been around for 5+ years, and only had its battery changed twice. I’d probably run some flavor of BSD, if my dayjob didn’t require Linux, containers and what not.

I spend most of my time in terminals running tmux, and let i3 manage windows for me. I use both Firefox and qutebrowser, or Chromium because Chrome is the web, don’t you know? Ah well, another thing that sucks.

I store passwords with Bitwarden, and synchronize files between various devices using a combination of Syncthing and git-annex. Musicpd is probably playing music close by.

Daily, I’m editing text from Neovim, or Emacs. I’m some kind of a polyglot developer with a taste for Ruby, Go, and sometimes Haskell. I’m always looking for excuses to play with other languages, more so if they try to change how I think of programming. Lately: Rust, Zig, Crystal, Elixir, Gleam, (…) all interesting, and flawed in their own way. :)

I should mention that I have zero brand loyalty for phones, and have run Nokia’s Maemo, Palm’s webOS, Apple’s iOS, Jolla’s SailfishOS, and lately Google’s Android. They all suck, and I hate phones anyway.

Photography

I have been into photography on and off for years.

A few years ago, I got a small Leica D-Lux, and experimented for a while until I decided I actually wanted a camera. So I upgraded to a fat Canon 5D (mark 2 at the time) which kept me busy for years with its billions megapixels, until I sold it. Canon makes great DSLRs and some excellent lenses, but I wanted lighter and less flashy gear. I also did not need that much megapixels.

Meanwhile I had been playing with borrowed Holga and Diana cameras ; but no matter how terrible tools they were in my hands, the film process was a fun distraction. I was hooked. I got myself the little Lomo LCA+, and carried it everywhere, happily snapping without thinking of how I was engaging my four Instagram followers.

Film, surprisingly, refuses to die. I am thankful for this long agony, even if it seems to produce lots of “analog artists”. These days, I’d rather print the pictures I like, which makes it hard to “like” them on any platform.

In the end, I found a Leica M6 in really good shape on e-bay, bought 35mm and 50mm lenses for it, and started to think a little before I take a picture. These days I always carry the Leica and Fuji in my little camera bag, and seem to have quenched my Gear Acquisition Syndrome.

I am by no mean a professional or an artist, but photography is a good way to get out of my comfort zone. It has allowed me to meet incredible people. Finally, shooting film rather than digital is part of a collection of details and setups that make my brain happier. Which is a good reason to keep using film as long as they sell it.

Still reading?

I have many projects related to my interests. One of these is to own all the data I produce voluntarily online, in order to make it available under this domain first-hand, before federating to various services. However, time is not my friend, and you’ll find me on various centralized online services:

That decentralization thing is ongoing ; we’ll see where it leads in a few years.