A year in France

January 7, 2016

It’s not easy to summarize in a few words, how I feel about our latest months in France.

To start with, terrorists (we?) have turned the country into a less-free place. There are more controls, and proportionally less privacy, less freedom. Nothing to be proud of, unless you are one of those short-sighted politicians that govern the damn place. I am not sure I know how to write politely about all this, so let me keep my thoughts for myself a little more.

On the other hand, I found a lot of fun in our humble Epistoli project. I am currently assuming the (very startupy) CTO role, meaning I get to setup invisible services and write back-end code in Ruby or Go, while my co-founder is playing with more buzzword friendly technologies: Javascript, React, who could resist?

If you forget the Javascript for a second, it is actually quite an interesting project. We get to write chatter bots, play cope with APIs, write our own, etc. In time, we will put some energy into engaging clients, because building a product is of course of no use unless you advertise it, and we are still blocking crawlers from indexing our stuff. To be honest, we are stretching a little the building part: this could be because we both spent some years making stuff for other people, and have found here a great playground, yet unspoiled of responsibilities. This is a dangerous place to be when you want to actually make things, so we will move off soon enough.

Meanwhile, this whole enterprise is an opportunity to release some open-source code. First, as the informal collective Les Pepitos, and secondly as the Epistoli entity of course. In case you wondered, epistoli is greek for letter ; the word may not stick forever but (news)letters are the most tangible thing or application is producing at the moment – hence the simple name.

This is is how I start 2016. Hopefully, I will write more this year than the past. No promises though. Thanks for reading.