Blog

7 Tips for Getting Started Successfully With Your New Team

Well done! You now have a new amazing team to work with. It might be a temporary team, as a project team, or it might be your first long-term team. Anyway here are my 7 tips to start on the right foot: 1 - be patient Remember that real change is slow. You are planning to create a winning team, and that means taking the time to observe, orient, decide, act OODA loop. Read more...

What does a TTL of 0 means in CloudFront and an intro to CloudFront

A technical article but with simple words (I hope). In AWS words: Amazon CloudFront is a fast content delivery network (CDN) service that securely delivers data, videos, applications, and APIs to customers globally with low latency, high transfer speeds, all within a developer-friendly environment. The benefits of a CDN, which is to reduce the load on the origin (i.e. less servers to buy) and better serve readers (data is closer to them). Read more...

When confronted with disruptive change: How do leaders react?

Christophe Leroy, a friend, an executive coach, and many other things, explained me that since the beginning of COVID19 we are all going through the phases of grief without knowing or acknowledging it. Around mid-march 2020 we all lost “normal-life”, and we are grieving it. This is true for you, as a leader, but also every member of your team. Everyone is at a different phase of the cycle, so everyone needs to be treated differently, starting with you. Read more...

Should I split tech?

I’ve the idea of spliting the tech side of this blog from the business side of it, mostly because most of you readers are interested (I hope) in one but not the other. What are your thoughts à bientôt Read more...

Don’t forget the maintenance

And while it is very easy to understand what maintenance means for objects, like cars or gadgets. The really important maintenance is on ourselves (e.g. health), the important persons around us (e.g. spouse, kids, parents), and for almost every other aspects of life. à bientôt Read more...

Is there a future for MBAs during COVID?

You can get access to excellent online training so what does paying for an MBA gives you? The diploma is sure something important, but networking is even more so. People attending MBA create very strong bond with others and share the same (figurative) battle scars. I know of startups being created and incubated by people that without the physical presence of the classroom would have never met. This connection is much harder (if even possible) to generate with remote learning. Read more...

Data is the future, but few understands it

After seeing the mighty power that data brought to some (very few) tech companies, I hear a lot about how collecting ALL data is the best thing to do in IT today. There are fewer references for proper use of the accumulated data, including results. I suspect that most companies do not know how to use the data collected and they keep it (making storage vendors rich), hoping that in some future it will all make sense. Read more...

The myth of innovation being led by the private sector (or how to fail to attract investors)

There is a myth about innovation that goes like this: Innovation is driven by Entrepreneurs in the private sector with the public sector at best a spectator, at worst a blocker. This is a myth! Life-changing progress requires long-term (i.e. 20+ years) investments, care and the creation of a new market. Getting it all wrong with investors Tell the following if you want to fail your presentation with potential investors. Read more...

RDS Postgresql S3 import of CSV and gzip files

When you are on an RDS Postgresql on AWS, you can import data from S3 into a table, the official documentation is here. The documentation only shows very basic examples of files directly in the root folder of the buckek. It also assumes the use of psql which is great for scripting but rubish for human-work (i.e. copy paste). So here is my extension to the documentation: assumption You need to be connected to your RDS database. Read more...

Experiments to reduce distractions

Have you ever turned on your mobile with a specific goal in mind and ended up being distracted by emails, chat, work up to the point of forgetting the initial purpose? It happens to me all the time. My most time-impacting distractions start when I read wikipedia. This is where my curiosity can get me lost of hours. For example, I learned (i.e. clicked and read the full article) about Synesthesia while reading about Billie Eilish. Read more...