I build systems, and I teach engineers to build them. The hard part is the same in both: deciding what to leave out.
Thirteen years of building software and cloud systems, and just as long teaching them. Today at Scaleway, I train the engineers who train everyone else.
- Now
- Lead Educational Engineer, Software & Cloud — Scaleway, Paris
- Also
- Founder of NX Academy, a free school for developers, in French ↗
The build side
The choice I'm proudest of doesn't look like much.
As CTO of SensCritique, I had to containerize our infrastructure. The expected answer was Kubernetes — the powerful one, the one that looks good on a CV. I went with Docker Swarm instead: smaller, plainer, and something the whole team could run and repair on a Sunday night without me.
I could have picked Kubernetes for the photo.
I'd make the same call today, and I make it every time I design a course: the content is never the hard part, deciding what to leave out is.
The teaching side
The course where I couldn't cut anything.
I wrote a course on design patterns in JavaScript. Nine patterns, the full catalog — the exact opposite of leaving things out. So where's the refusal?
Not in what I removed; a course on patterns has to cover the patterns. It's in the order. You don't open with a pattern. You open with the objects and inheritance that make patterns readable at all. Then they arrive, one at a time, each one starting from a real problem rather than a definition.
The inventory is real. What I refuse is to dump it all at once.
I'm always up for a conversation about teaching engineers — a training program to build, a talk to give, or just the problem itself.