Blog

Article on Medium:
https://medium.com/@damln/looking-forward-5d5e1bd5862c

Article on Medium:
https://medium.com/@damln/you-are-what-you-see-44d7ed94cdeb

I never understood my friends buying a 15 000 € new car at age 20. Do you realise this is a lot of money for a piece of metal using a stupid engine? What get me crazy is worst: these same people prefer to live in their parent’s home and having a fancy car rather than experiencing freedom in their own place. It’s a widely spread pattern. I saw this many times in Spain, Italy, and France.

This article is a tribute to my family, my friends, and my surrounding who help me to grow up in a positive way. When I meet people and they ask about my past, they are surprised by my “career” and often say “Bravo, you can be proud of being a self made man”.

The essence of perfection is a powerful marketing concept. You are surrounded by perfection. All the Instagram pics you see are perfect, everything around you looks perfect, the ads, the models, the success stories. The marketing orchestra plays around this concept for a reason: you need a new tool to reach perfection, and a new one, and probably a new one next year. Companies can sell dreams, every day. The quest of perfection is a perfect never ending story.

It’s been a year now that I stopped using Facebook. I didn’t really stopped but I removed my Facebook Feed (article part 1, interlude, part 2).

This is what I want to be an honest feedback about this experience. It was not all green and beautiful. Removing an addiction sometimes makes you discover new darkness and I will explain which ones exactly.

First of all, thank you all for the reactions: the haters, the feedbacks, the explanations and the thousand tweets and “claps”. All of your contributions help to create awareness regarding our privacy. Many media contacted me to talk about this, some guys translated it in italian and spanish. The post had way more impact than I though.

This year, I ended up in situations where calling and texting were not enough to make myself clear. In some critical moments of my life, I wanted to express myself differently and take my time to carefully pick my words.

Some weeks ago, I saw an ad (sponsored post) on Instagram that surprised me. It was about a product I never googled, shared, liked, or talked about on any social network even in direct messages. I had a bad intuition: the only time this product came up was in a random chat with a couple of friends in a cafe. And the only way for Instagram to know about this was to listen to my real life conversations with the microphone.

Since I went back as a solo consultant, people contact me to help them in their development adventures. One of the most frequent questions is..

Paris, we know each other since a long time. I met you when I was 11 years old and I was impressed. You were the largest city I’ve ever seen. I knew we were meant to be together.

Some tools I use. Pick whatever you find useful.

As promised, I will debrief what I’ve learned and observed after one month without my Facebook News Feed. And because we all want 2017 to be the best year of our short life, we should all observe our environment, tune it, and try to get the best out of it.

I recently wrote an article about my Facebook experiment: Unfollowing my Facebook friends (Part I). I recommend you to read it before going further but it’s not mandatory. I called this post “interlude” because the Part II will contain more details and feedback after two weeks of experiment.

Yesterday at the Paris Ruby Meetup (ParisRB), one of the organisers (Thibault Assus) did a talk about how to receive less emails and reduce “social noise” in your daily routine. He covered how to do smart email subscriptions with Unroll.me and why you should disable your mobile push notifications.

After nearly three years building Geeksters with my partner Kamel, I spent a lot of time working with developers, clients, designers, partners and people in general.

After some discussions with our Rails developers team, we agree on some guidelines for our controllers. You should understand why controllers should stay skinny and there are some tips you can use to reduce their size.

I want to explain my choice for the Macbook Air 11”. It’s not really about an Apple product. It’s about the reason I’m riding a 11” laptop.

Yesterday I wanted to get deeper in Sass by trying Sassc. Sassc is a wrapper for Libsass and Libsass is a Sass compiler build in C++. The project was created and announced by Hampton Catlin (creator of Sass)

It’s easy to recover removed files from a fresh formatted disk. Formatting only affects the partition index, not the data. I’m a bit paranoid about my data and I decided to really clean the data on a flash drive I wanted to sell.