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RENAISSANCE
Nicolas Herry
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2022/10/22
1 Renaissance
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Almost five years have passed since my last post here. A lot has
happened since, both in my personal life and in my professional
life. If I am not going to go into details when it comes to the
former, I can develop a bit on the latter.
1.1 I delivered
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
When I re-joined Gigantic Enterprises, I immediately moved to
Norway to deliver a large project, that was already ten years in
the making and which should have been finished in three. The
project was not just complex, but rather complicated, and so were
the teams working on either side. Upon entering the scene, one
could taste the bad blood and the smell the smoking guns, but by
paying close attention, one could also see how much some people
still wanted to put the project on production, against all
odds. After all this time, that so many had kept the will to work
on the same project, to revisit the same topics again and again,
for the millionth time, and listen to yet another new manager, is
a testament to their resilience. The project was very ill,
infected by a bad case of Dilbertian management, constant
disastrous miscommunication and mistrust on both sides. Norwegian
and French culture don't blend well.
And yet, some technical people still had the desire to work
together, to fulfil their mission. I helped all I could, by
fixing the communication problems (doubling every meeting with a
second one with the customer, where I would offer subtitles to
what had been said, essentially translating from Engish to
English), and by building a local team to organise work from
coding practices down to production work, including release
management and delivery. In other words, I built a DevOps team to
take care of delivering the project. This took a core team of a
dozen people (and a total of fifty), working at a crazy pace, for
two years, and we made it. We were clever enough to productise
our work from the beginning, from processes to code, and we could
generalise the effort to other projects, other customers, other
countries.
We all learnt a lot, and if the title of this section is "I
delivered", it is really them who delivered the project, for they
achieved what many believed was impossible. On my side, what I
have delivered is their ability to deliver. I created the culture
and nurtured it, I carefully crafted a team of people who had
never heard of DevOps before but had it all in their minds
already, many without even realising it. They didn't know
Ansible, terraform, CI/CD, and some didn't even know git. But
they all understood that a reliable production is everything, and
that the DNA of a production is that of the whole chain of tools
and people leading to it. So, I was lucky enough that I got to
deliver what I value the most: self-fulfillment and growth to
high-quality people.
But all this left me depleted of all energy, completely
knackered, by the end of 2019.
1.2 A new flat
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
I moved. Right when I was but an empty shell, I moved into a
large, cosy, gorgeous flat, ideally situated right in the city
centre. I am still living in this flat, three years later, now in
2022, and I'm typing these lines by the warm fire crackling
gently in my stove, sitting in a comfy chair under my hammock. A
true paradise... As I was nesting there, just three months later,
Covid broke out, and life changed for everyone. During these two,
almost three years of isolation, I got to catch my breath,
rediscover myself, and progress an awful lot in my personal
life. As much as Covid has been a disaster for so many people, it
also was an opportunity for me to stop and think.
1.3 A new job
~~~~~~~~~~~~~
One consequence of all this thinking has been my getting a new
job. The work I had set out to do in 2017 was basically done and
delivered, and I felt I didn't have much more to learn within the
Gigantic Enterprises. So I looked around a little for companies I
would actually like to work for, which is not an easy task, given
how picky I must admit I am today. One caught my eye, and after a
couple of interviews and a case delivery (the first in my entire
career!), I joined the perfect combination of a traditional
Norwegian company and an open, multicultural environment. When I
say interviews, they really felt more like a good, engaging
discussion with smart people than anything else. I did not try to
sell myself (as I don't do that), and they didn't try to sell
their company. To put it short, we both remained genuine each on
our side, and spoke our minds openly. This, to me, is a
professional turn on. People who don't feel a need to impress
others are people I want to work with.
I am now in the middle of the typical first journey after you've
joined a new, creative company: I am learning ten different new
things every day, stretching my mind, honing my skills and
challenging myself. As this is starting to settle down a little,
I now have a bit more time to dedicate to fun things again.
1.4 Gopher!
~~~~~~~~~~~
My last post here was about Gopher, and how I had decided to open
my gopherhole here. It's now done and cleaned up, and has been
serving my old posts so far. But today, it's getting its first
brand new entry! And to celebrate these five years of
productivity gap, and my twenty-five years of presence on the
Internet (yes, 1997 was /25 years ago/...), I've also started to
work on my own Gopher server. I will detail the ideas in another
entry here, but what I can say is that the project is ambitious,
as I aim to suport Gopher, Gopher+ (the unloved) and gemini. The
last of this trio is a rather recent development that, as I
understand it, emerged from frustration in front of a bloated
Web, and an underpowered Gopher. Gemini tries to strike the right
balance between the structured cleanliness and simplicity of
Gopher and some of the convenient or secure facets of the Web,
like SSL. This initiative is one additional thread in the fabric
of these brand new days, that to me, feel like a
renaissance. That of the early Web, that of my little Gopher,
and, very much, my own.