Avant de partir vivre à San Francisco en 2011, mes proches m’avaient mis en garde. “Ne mange pas trop de hamburgers” me disaient-ils. Je ne prenais pas trop leurs conseils au sérieux car je n’avais aucune intention de devenir le cliché de l’Européen qui débarque aux États-Unis et qui devient gros et malade. Mais après deux ans, il fallait bien le reconnaitre, j’étais devenu ce cliché.

Mon médecin sur place était formel. J’étais déjà à la limite de l’obésité, mais si je continuais comme ça, c’est le diabète de type 2 et les problèmes cardiaques qui me pendaient au nez. Ce même médecin m’a alors parlé d’un régime un peu spécial, le régime cétogène (keto). Selon lui, un régime “low carb” de ce genre est ce qui pourrait me sortir de la situation dans laquelle j’étais. Mais je ne voulais pas croire que stopper le sucre et manger aussi gras—voire beaucoup plus—qu’avant pourrait me sauver. C’était contraire à tout ce qu’on m’avait toujours dit. Toujours est-il qu’après à peine quelques mois à suivre ce régime, j’avais perdu plus de 15 kg, et j’étais dans une forme étincelante. Ce truc qui était à l’opposé de la pensée commune en matière de nutrition avait brillamment fonctionné sur moi, et je ne semblais pas être le seul dans le cas.

Comme j’aime bien comprendre comment les choses fonctionnent, j’ai commencé à lire un bouquin sur le sujet, puis un autre, et puis encore un autre, etc. J’étais tombé dans le “rabbit hole” et aujourd’hui, une cinquantaine de livres plus tard, je n’en suis toujours pas sorti. Ayant maintenant acquis une certaine expertise sur le sujet, j’ai récemment décidé de lancer une chaîne YouTube afin que toute cette connaissance acquise au fil des années puisse également servir à d’autres.

Je ne me suis toutefois pas arrêté là, car la clé d’une bonne santé ne repose pas uniquement sur la nutrition. Tout d’abord, à l’été 2021, j’ai commencé à pratiquer le CrossFit, probablement une des meilleures décisions que j’ai prises dans ma vie. Comme beaucoup de gens, j’avais une image mitigée de la chose. Cependant, après en avoir compris la philosophie, je me suis rendu compte que c’est le meilleur sport qu’on puisse pratiquer car il travaille de façon équivalente les 10 compétences fondamentales pour tout être humain, à savoir l'endurance cardio-vasculaire et respiratoire, l'endurance musculaire, la force, la souplesse, la puissance, la vitesse, l'agilité, la coordination, l'équilibre, et la précision.

Mais je n’en avais pas encore terminé. En plus de la nutrition et du sport, je devais également me pencher sur la troisième pièce du puzzle pour une santé optimale : le sommeil. Étant un “ronfleur” depuis quasiment toujours, je me devais de savoir si ça cachait quelque chose de plus grave. J’ai eu raison de le faire. Après avoir dormi une nuit à l’hôpital à l’automne 2021, le verdict était sans appel : non seulement je faisais des apnées du sommeil, mais celles-ci étaient qualifiées de sévères, dans le sens où elles pouvaient réduire mon espérance de vie d’au moins 10 ans si je n’y faisais rien. J’ai donc fait ce que je devais faire (l’acquisition d’une CPAP), les apnées ont disparu, les ronflements aussi, et j’ai désormais un sommeil réellement réparateur. Encore une décision à mettre dans le top 5 des meilleures décisions de ma vie.

Cette obsession pour ma santé personnelle et cette passion pour la santé de manière générale sont cependant toujours restés des hobbies. Étant informaticien de formation, mes journées étaient principalement occupées par l’écriture de code source en JavaScript ou en Python pour les quelques startups auxquelles j’ai participé, en tant que fondateur ou non. J’ai souvent pensé à des idées de startups à lancer dans la santé, mais je ne suis jamais parvenu à trouver une idée suffisamment forte pour arrêter ce que j’étais en train de faire et y consacrer 100% de mon temps.

Pourtant, suite au décès de mon papa il y a deux ans, une mort prématurée à l’âge de 67 ans causée en partie par un mauvais style de vie, je me suis doucement découvert une nouvelle mission de vie : pouvoir conseiller des gens pour les ramener sur le chemin de la santé. J’aurais pu devenir coach comme il y en a déjà des milliers et avoir ma petite base de clients mais cela ne m’intéressait pas, je voulais un truc qui puisse “scaler”, afin d’aider des millions de gens, et non pas une centaine. J’étais bloqué.

Et puis, le 6 juillet 2023, tout a changé. Avec Lionel avec qui je travaille depuis maintenant plus d’une décennie, nous avions rendez-vous pour un diner avec Jeremy, un entrepreneur et ami de longue date. Lionel et moi étions curieux de savoir pourquoi Jeremy voulait nous voir, mais le suspense n’a pas duré très longtemps. Il voulait que nous participions à l’élaboration de sa nouvelle startup ultra ambitieuse dans le domaine de la santé. Sa femme Laura étant cardiologue, cela faisait longtemps qu’ils cherchaient à lancer quelque chose pour révolutionner ce milieu de la santé en piteux état.

Pour Laura, en tant que praticienne, les soins de santé riment surtout avec frustration, burn-out, hôpitaux en faillite, aseptisation des lieux de travail, lourdeur administrative et surtout course incessante à la rentabilité dans un environnement souvent toxique. Pour les patients, le constat est possiblement pire car cela rime avec anxiété, manque d’écoute et de transparence, infantilisation et retards systématiques.

C’est pour résoudre ces nombreux problèmes que nous avons décidé de lancer Riva.

L’idée de Riva est simple mais évidemment ambitieuse : proposer un nouveau standard de soins axé sur la prévention, avec un focus particulier sur la nutrition, le sport, le sommeil, et la santé mentale. Et concrètement, la première étape pour accomplir cette mission va se matérialiser par des checkups santé d’un nouveau genre, à des années-lumière de ce qui a toujours existé.

Évidemment, vu mon passif, c’était une aubaine et j’ai immédiatement été séduit par l’idée. Faisant désormais partie intégrante de l’équipe fondatrice, je suis heureux de pouvoir allier ma passion avec mon métier, avec un objectif noble qui est de pouvoir sauver le plus de vies possibles, là où j’ai échoué à sauver celle de mon papa, mais la où j’ai réussi à sauver la mienne.

First, it's important to understand what the FIFA ranking is. Simply put, the FIFA ranking is like the ATP ranking of football, where teams win points when they beat other teams. The ranking system has been introduced in 1992 and, responding to criticism, it has been revamped on several occasions, but since August 2018 it has adopted a variation of the Elo rating system used in chess.

The concept is pretty simple: you score more points if you beat a team that is highly ranked and fewer points if you beat a team that is badly ranked (so you’ll score more points if you beat Argentina than if you beat Vietnam).

If you’re not familiar with chess but have watched the Social Network movie, the Elo rating system is what the characters in the movie use to rank girls on their Facemash website.

Even though the FIFA ranking is controversial, the Elo rating system has been used since forever in chess and has been generally accepted as a great way to rank chess players, so there’s no valid scientific reason to say it would not make sense when applied to football.

So let’s move on to the second point of my argument: why is the World Cup the worst way to determine which is the best team in the world?

And don’t get me wrong, the World Cup will be won by a very good team, but not necessarily the best team (it’s almost never the best team that wins it). Football is random and unpredictable. As football is a low-scoring sport where 0-0s occur quite often, it’s not unusual to see a single unfortunate event influence the fate of a match. A weak team can score a few minutes after kick-off and then put everything in defense to win a match against a strong team. It basically happens all the time and happened a few times during the World Cup already.

In other sports, the best team usually wins. Take basketball for example. It’s a high-scoring sport and unless your star player gets injured, a single event is unlikely to completely change a game. It’s not like a team will luckily score at the beginning of the game and then defend until the end to keep its advantage. The best team that day will eventually win. And even if it doesn’t happen, the playoff system where you have to win the most out of 5 games will ensure that the best team overall will end up winning.

That’s why I don’t bet on football matches. It's a waste of money. You’ll lose most of the time. And if you happen to win every once in a while, it’s not because you’re knowledgeable, it’s because you’re lucky.

Before the World Cup, a mathematical model implemented by the University of Oxford predicted who would win the World Cup. They got it hilariously wrong. In the end, it’s probably a better idea to trust an octopus for football predictions.

In the same vein of the FIFA ranking trying to be as accurate as possible, I like the expected goals (xG) stat a lot. It shows who should have won a match.

If you’re not familiar with the stat, it tells how many goals the two teams should have scored if everything happened according to logic. If a player misses an unmissable goal from very close range, the xG would say something like 0.98 when in reality it counts as 0. In the same way, if a player scores an incredibly lucky goal from the middle of the pitch, the xG would be something like 0.01 but it really counts as 1. There are countless examples of matches where the team with the higher xG actually lost. For example, Morocco lost all of its first 5 games on xG during the World Cup. If logic was respected, they should have been out after 3 games.

And according to xG, England, Spain, Brazil, and Argentina were the best teams at the World Cup.

You understand where I’m going. To win a tournament like the World Cup, you don’t need to be the best team. You just have to be lucky 7 times. Morocco was already lucky 5 times, it wouldn’t be that crazy if that happens 2 more times.

We actually have a few examples of unexpected teams winning an important tournament. The most famous examples are Denmark winning the Euro in 1992 and Greece winning the same competition 12 years later.

Championships are much better predictors of the best team than a competition like the World Cup. After more than 30 games, it’s usually the best team that comes on top, but not always. You can still have an incredibly lucky season or an incredibly unlucky season. We should have a season of about 1000 matches to start being statistically representative, the same way polls need to interview at least 1000 people to have accurate results, but obviously, it's not going to happen anytime soon, and football will stay unpredictable forever.

But even if you're crazy about mathematics like I am, I must admit a predictable football would take away everything I love about it. So, let’s not try to change it. And I hope Morocco wins the World Cup!

A few days ago, Figma was able to get the @figma Twitter handle to replace the historic @figmadesign that they used for many years. I don’t really know who owned @figma before but to be able to get it, Figma must have dealt with Twitter directly, and they were able to do so because they are a renowned company.

On my side, I started a new side project two weeks ago and gave it a 3-letter name. The Twitter handle for that name is obviously taken, but from someone who hasn't tweeted since 2013. The account is pretty much anonymous so there’s no way to contact the owner to try to buy it. And as I’m not Figma, Twitter would certainly be less keen to respond to my requests.

This brings us back to NFTs. Last year, ENS publicly launched a way to map an easy-to-remember name (with the .eth suffix) to a wallet address (which is a long and complex string of numbers and letters). This is pretty much the same principle as a domain name resolving to an IP address.

What I realized later though is that when you buy an ENS username, you actually acquire a unique NFT of that username. Mine is here. It’s then easy to reconcile the fact that vinchbat.eth is associated with my wallet address 0x502e5174332239cee9915ab22764cd7684d27da1 because I own that NFT.

Now comes the interesting part... I got vinchbat.eth because my first choice (vinch.eth) was already taken (by this person). But if I'm really motivated and I want to buy vinch.eth no matter what, I could totally make an offer to that person directly and come to an arrangement, without any 3rd parties involved. ENS usernames also have expiration dates (just like domain names) written in the smart contract, so if that person is unresponsive, I could just wait. No more inactive account lying around for decades, and no third parties involved.

I think all new social networks that will appear from now on should use that strategy for usernames, or build on something existing, like ENS. It makes so much more sense.

It presented 3 choices:

• Money
• Status
• Impact

It made me think because I didn’t recognize myself in any of these propositions.

The one thing missing for me in that list was freedom. This is why I'm doing this. Why? Because time is the most valuable asset I have. What I want is not more money, but to do whatever I want to do with the time I have in my hands. We can always get more money, but we cannot get more time.

To take some factual examples, I want to be able to wake up in the morning and decide that I will not work that day. I want to be able to take two hours at lunchtime to work out or read a nice book. I want to be able to stop my day earlier so I can spend more time with my kids. The thing is, I will not necessarily do all these things on a daily basis. Most of the time, I will still work 8+ hours per day, because I'm passionate and I kinda love what I do. Nevertheless, having the possibility of allowing myself short or long breaks if and when I want to is really what it’s all about.

By choosing freedom as my most important value as an entrepreneur doesn’t mean I don’t like money, status, or impact, but I don’t optimize for these things.

Money is nice but if it was my sole goal, I know I would make much more money by moving back to San Francisco and working for the likes of Google, Apple, or Uber. I’d have a boss that tells me what to do and probably days filled with meetings though, so I know it’s not for me.

Status is also nice because it’s good for the ego to be recognized as an expert in your field, someone people look up to. But again, I’m sure most people would be much more impressed to see that I’m an employee at one of the companies mentioned earlier, than being a founder at a startup they’ve never heard of. This is the sad reality.

Having an impact is obviously great. Being able to change the world is a noble goal but if you’re an entrepreneur for that reason, you might be disappointed because very few can achieve it. And even for those who did achieve to change the world, it’s still very unclear if they made the world a better place or a worse place than before. Recruiters from big companies always use impact as an argument to work for them. “What you do will be seen by hundreds of millions of people!” Sure, but what you will do might be the advanced search feature nobody uses or the privacy settings nobody cares about. Also, you could totally work for 6 months on a thing and having it canceled two weeks before it was supposed to go live.

It took me a long time to figure this all out. I’m proud to be a balanced person, I call myself a generalist, so for a long while I naturally tried to get everything at the same time, without really thinking about it. But when you do that, the likely result is that you’ll get nothing, or at best, a half-baked version of everything. I realized I needed something I optimize for, and freedom came as the natural thing for me, for all the reasons mentioned earlier.

And don’t get me wrong, I don’t say you should do like me. What works for me doesn’t necessarily work for someone else. What I’m trying to say is that you must choose the one thing you optimize for. The north star. All your decisions must be based on whether they will improve what you optimize for. And if it also improves the other aspects, fine, but it’s a bonus.

How so? We are racists because we hardly do anything in a racist society where being white is the norm and being a person of color is a deviation from this norm. We are complicit. In the end, it’s understandable: why would we want change in a system that unfairly advantages us?

Does that mean we are bad people? Certainly not. This is not binary. And unless we consciously make life difficult for people of color and see them as inferior, our racism is unintentional. We have too many assumptions about people of color that are difficult to control, even as we try to convince ourselves that everyone is equal in our eyes.

My personal story is that I was born in Belgium to an Italian father and a Belgian mother. I know that when people see my last name, they have some assumptions about me even if they are mostly unintentional. Would I have had more opportunities in my life and my career if my full name was Vincent Bataille? I will never know, but it’s not the point. I’m a white man, I have no right to complain because the world is made to be simple for someone like me. My point was that if even someone like me can feel some discomfort from being a bit outside of the norm, imagine what people of color must endure every day.

I’ll be completely honest with you: I can't tell if I’ll ever need to or want to take action against my unintentional racism. At this very moment, I really want to make a change, but in a few weeks, I may have completely forgotten to have read this book and wrote this article. I'll be back in my very comfortable white-dominated world where everything is easy for me, and where I don't really have to care about what less fortunate people have to go through. That said, I'm convinced that the fact that I've just recognized my racism was definitely the most difficult thing to accomplish, and if I was able to do that, there's no reason to think I can't do more.

Admit it, for each of the things I just listed, you have your own favorite side. The thing is, some debates have a clear correct answer if you make the effort to inform yourself (I’m looking at you, flat earthers), but the correct answer is usually somewhere in the middle (the infamous “it depends”).

There are actually three different types of binary thinking, which could be summarized this way:

1. The Truth Binary is when we view a statement as true or false. Example: “I believe that the government is incompetent.”
2. The Goodness Binary is when we view things as either good or bad, positive or negative, or moral or immoral when it’s in fact a mix of all these things. Example: “That book is good.”
3. The Identification Binary is when we view things as either a member of a class or not a member of that class, when in fact, almost every categorization admits edge cases that lie between categories or fails to categorize some cases. Example: “He’s a criminal.”

Is it very sad to see that because we see everything as binary, with a black side and a white side, we actually disagree with people who hold the same opinions as we do, but with not the same level of engagement. In other words, in our binary ways of thinking, someone who thinks “black” will see someone who thinks “dark grey” as someone who thinks “white”, where both actually think (mostly) “black”, with one being more extreme and the other more measured. Every day, people are being called “communists” for criticizing capitalism, “Luddites” for criticizing technological progress, or “climate deniers” for criticizing the actions of a group like Extinction Rebellion. This is the sad state of things.

Think in shades of grey instead of black and white

The Internet was supposed to make things better because we now have access to all the information of the world. Being ignorant 30 years ago was understandable, but now, with all that knowledge available to all of us, it should be considered a crime, right? Well, the Internet actually made things worse, and it will be difficult (if not impossible) to counter that phenomenon. Why? Simply because the Internet makes it easy to find resources that go in the way of your initial beliefs, without having to look at what's going on elsewhere. If you think Earth is 6,000 years old or 4.5 billion years old, you’ll easily find articles or videos confirming your belief, making you think—with the greatest certainty—that you’re right. It’s called the confirmation bias, one of the worst things our brains are doing to us. But even if we would have the courage to look for different points of view, and that’s the most depressing thing there is, facts don’t change our minds. We’ll likely continue believing what we initially believed, even when presented with strong facts showing us that our belief is wrong, or at least not totally right.

My dream is a world where everyone would have a nuanced point of view on most issues. Unfortunately, it’s not going to happen anytime soon because our world doesn’t reward nuanced points of view. What makes the most likes on social media and the newspapers headlines are strong—sometimes extreme—opinions. As Etienne Klein says, if you are interviewed by a journalist and answer “it depends” to all of their questions, you’re probably not gonna be interviewed ever again, even though all your answers are technically correct. I’ve seen someone being called “boring” for having a nuanced opinion about an issue, even though their “attacker” admitted that they were right. In 2021, being right is being boring. Yay!

But let’s not be too depressed about all this, because there are things we can do to make things better (remember I told you I was an optimistic person). So what can we do about it exactly?

Well, there are a few options (not exhaustive):

• Probabilistic Thinking is thinking in percentages instead of in yes and no. It is mainly meant as a solution for the Truth Binary. Every time you think of yes or no, try to associate a confidence level to it. For example: “I’m 70% confident that the government is incompetent.” This is good because you keep the door open by admitting that you don't know everything, even if you have an opinion. This humility will be seen positively by those who argue with you, and there's a good chance you will all grow up from this discussion.
• Grey Thinking is admitting that good things usually have some bad elements, that bad things usually have some good elements, and that many things lie somewhere in the middle. Nothing is totally black or totally white. For example: “That book is good, but it's true that some parts were unnecessarily complicated and difficult to understand.” Grey Thinking is mainly meant as a solution for the Goodness Binary.
• Multi-factor Thinking is a solution to the Identification Binary. Whenever you feel that you're oversimplifying or misjudging, ask yourself what ways this thing is similar or different to a category, how it might blend multiple categories, and what traits it has irrespective of categories. For example: “Robin Hood is both a criminal and a hero.”
• Directional Thinking is a concept proposed by Daniel Priestley in his book "Key Person of Influence" and described here. It is particularly relevant to people like me because it revolves around the notion of success for entrepreneurs, something that’s not always clear when you’re working on your own thing and can take a long time in the making; but that’s if you think in a binary way, around the concept of milestones. Instead of doing that, Daniel Priestley suggests we should think in terms of small grey steps in the right direction.
• Spectrum thinking is a model proposed by Oz Chen that considers multiple options, alternatives, and possibilities that sit in the grey zone. In his opinion, spectrum thinking is a better representation of the human condition, which is inherently dynamic and evolving. Instead of having to choose between option A and option B, you have other options like both, between, other, and neither.
• Strong Opinions, Weakly Held is a thinking framework developed by technology forecaster and Stanford University professor Paul Saffo. It’s about admitting the fact that you don’t know everything (yet) but not wait until having all the information to form an opinion (that’s the “Strong Opinion” part). On the other hand, it requires keeping an open mind and being OK to be proven wrong by yourself or someone else when presented with new information (that’s the “Weakly Held” part). Changing your mind is a strength, not a weakness.

Those are all different—but sometimes very similar—ways to counter the same problem. It’s like all these diets that are based on the same principles but vary in the details. You don’t have to choose one of them and stick to it religiously. You first need to understand what they are about, and what they’re trying to fix. Then, you can mix them together with your favorite pieces from each of them and come with a new one. You can even give it an original name. It’s up to you. In the end, the most important thing is that we all stop thinking in a binary way, for our own personal good, but also for the greater good of humanity in general.

I’m personally a big believer in not reinventing the wheel. It’s 2021 and there’s a library or a SaaS for almost anything, and I will always reuse or buy instead of building it myself if I have the opportunity to do so, simply because it’s faster and cheaper. That’s how we were able to build such a complex piece of software like Ludus with a very small team.

So, I’m not against the no-code movement per se, and I actually think it’s great for everyone, but I’m against some ideas that are floating around it.

Fallacy #1: You can now build a very complex project with no-code

No-code tools like Glide or Bubble are great to build MVPs or prototypes but if you want to be serious about the software you’re building, you’ll need to write code at some point. As I already said, I will always use something that exists instead of building it myself, but something like Ludus couldn’t have been built only with no-code tools, it’s just too complex. At the same time, building Ludus wouldn’t have been possible for our small team to build without taking advantage of what already exists out there. If we were able to build something so complex so quickly with limited resources, it’s because we reused existing stuff wherever possible. In the end, it almost felt like assembling LEGO bricks, to the difference that we had to glue them together, and that glue is code.

Fallacy #2: No-code will replace the need for coding

Thinking that no-code will replace the need for coding is like thinking you don’t need to learn foreign languages because there’s Google Translate. Yeah, maybe one day it will not be necessary to know JavaScript or Spanish, but we’re still very far away from that day. I strongly recommend anyone to learn to code and not see the no-code movement as a miracle way to avoid that. Learning to code is not scary. We should stop referring to it as “getting your hands dirty” like it’s an inferior way to do things and we’re too good for that. It’s natural when you’re used to it, there’s nothing dirty about it. And knowing languages like JavaScript, Python, and SQL will give you superpowers.

Fallacy #3: No-code will replace the need for programmers

I disagree with people who say that no-code is the future and that it will ultimately replace the need for programmers. It will actually just simplify their work and allow them to focus on more complicated tasks, but there will always be work for them. And this simplification is not new. The very raw definition of a programmer is someone who automates boring tasks by writing code. And if writing code becomes a boring task, programmers will always find a way to automate that as well. It’s the way it is since forever. Just look at the evolution of programming languages, by comparing Assembly to JavaScript, for example, to convince you of it. Simplifying the life of the programmer has always been and will always be the goal, and programmers should not feel threatened by no-code tools or code automation tools like GitHub Copilot. It can be seen as shooting yourself in the foot but I don’t see it differently as a doctor whose job is to heal people when his very own business depends on people being sick. There will always be sick people to heal and always code to write.

Fallacy #4: No-code is the fastest way to build software

As soon as you know how to code, some stuff is still much faster and easier to manage with a few lines of code, instead of trying to connect 7 different services in a GUI like Zapier to do the same job. No-code can help build stuff that you couldn’t have build without code 10 years ago, but when it becomes an obsession and almost a challenge, it’s becoming ridiculous. When code is the best option, use code. It reminds me of people who create complex drawings with CSS, just for the sake of the challenge, when it would be so much easier to do it with a graphical tool that outputs SVG. There is nothing impressive in using the wrong tool for the job.

Fallacy #5: No-code tools are for non-programmers only

Here I’m talking to the programmers. As the Wikipedia definition that I shared above nicely put it, no-code tools are not only for non-programmers. If you’re a programmer, you should definitely try to use outside help when it’s possible. Writing everything by yourself is not impressive, it’s just an enormous waste of time. So, as always, it’s about finding the right balance between doing stuff by yourself and reuse existing stuff.

—

In conclusion, I would insist again on the fact that simplifying software building is not a new trend, it’s always been the case. It seems that the no-code movement made this trend more visible and it's true that we can now build very interesting things without writing a line of code. Nevertheless, if you’re not a programmer, learning to code still makes perfect sense in 2021. On the other hand, if you’re a programmer, learn to use no-code tools, it will save you a lot of time, and allow you to focus on more complex problems.

Hybrid work means that you don’t only work from the office anymore but that you alternate between the office, your own home, or other places like co-working spaces or cafes. As most modern jobs only require a laptop and a good (enough) Internet connection, this has obviously become an achievable feat, and it will be more and more common with the rise of 5G and satellite Internet access (like Starlink).

For a very long time, people had intense debates to decide whether working from home is better than working from the office (and vice versa). The reality is that it’s not a binary thing, it’s not one or the other. The future is a mix of both, on your own terms. For example, my personal preference is working 3 or 4 days at home, so I can focus on getting things done, and spend 1 or 2 days with other people, at the office or at another place, so I don’t become completely asocial and I can discuss and brainstorm with colleagues, things that are more difficult to do via Zoom calls.

Async means that you don’t only work during a defined period of time (9 to 5), you work whenever you want to work. If you have kids and the best time to focus for you is before they wake up or after they go to sleep, you should be free to do so. (You should also be free to continue working from 9 to 5 if it’s what’s works best for you of course.) This “hybridization” of work also makes sense as more and more companies are becoming global—even small startups—and juggling with timezone differences is becoming the norm. All this means that we’re not all working at the same time, and we need to find new ways of communicating that are less synchronous (meetings) and that respect the time of everyone.

The number of hours you work will also be less and less relevant. You can forget about the 40-hour workweek. The new normal is weekly (or monthly) goals, and if it takes 20 or 40 hours of your week to achieve them, it doesn’t matter. It’s crazy that I have to make this point but we should judge people on their achievements and not the number of hours they work in a week. With jobs disappearing due to automation, I’m also deeply convinced that in the future we won’t work more than 20 hours per week, and for the same salary, but this is probably a topic for another article.

In the end, companies that offer the perks of hybrid and async will attract the best talents, and other more old-school companies will have to follow, even if it’s a bit against their will, to remain competitive in the job market. Those who refuse to adapt will die, it’s as simple as that. Hybrid and async are the new ping pong table and free lunch (shamelessly stolen from Randall Kanna).

And of course, when the world change as much as it did in recent years, new startups emerge to embrace that new reality. I selected 6 of them, all trying to solve new problems that appeared due to our new ways of working. What are these problems? I mainly identified two. The first one would be the overload of Zoom meetings (the so-called “Zoom fatigue”) which replaced the IRL meetings but that are way more boring and tiring than the real deal. The other problem is the isolation that comes with being alone at home and not having human contact with anyone.

The first startup I want to talk about is Claap. What they offer is a way to do asynchronous meetings, by recording a video on top of anything and allow other people to interact with it. It’s a very cool tool and they just raised $3M, so they are here to stay.

Founded by an ex-Uber exec, Teamflow helps your team to feel like a team again, by providing a virtual environment where you can hang out like in a real office. I’m not personally a big fan of tools trying to mimic reality, but this one is really well done and is full of little big details that make the difference. Also, I know that creativity doesn’t come from planned meetings, but from random moments. Teamflow recreates these random moments, even if it’s in a virtual manner.

Café is another good one. As work is becoming hybrid and we’re going to the office less regularly, we need a way to manage this flexibility, to be able to know who is where and when. Café allows just that.

Spot is a very simple concept, the kind of idea I feel bad about not having had myself: an app to do walking meetings. You can see it as some kind of private Clubhouse, as it’s audio-only, but it provides much more possibilities than the famous audio social network. In addition to reducing your Zoom fatigue, it will also help you become more fit. Double win.

Fleex is very different from everything that’s been presented here thus far, but it’s very smart as it’s solving a new problem that appeared with the rise of remote work: not everyone has everything that they need to work from home in the best conditions. Fleex solves that by providing a platform where companies can offer their employees to buy the equipment they need for their home office (screens, printers, chairs, desks, coffee machines, etc.), and also offers to deliver and set up everything.

Last but not least, TL;DV is a bit similar to Claap or Spot, or at least they’re trying to solve the same problem (Zoom fatigue), but in a different way, as they allow to tag the most important moments of your meetings (aka highlights) for you colleagues to catch up afterward without watching the entire thing.

Those are the 6 startups I wanted to talk about today, but I probably missed many, so don’t hesitate to send me interesting things that solve the problems that have arisen because of our new ways of working.

Oh, and I forgot to mention that all these startups are actually created in Europe, or from European founders (mostly French). The European tech scene is growing fast! (But this is also a topic for another article.)

Speaking of my own personal experience, I sometimes found myself in a situation where I needed to give a talk about a topic that I thought I had mastered thoroughly, only to find out when preparing my slides and doing some more research that there were a lot of things that I didn't know yet. When writing my latest article about the technologies I use on this website, I learned a few interesting things about Jamstack, Gatsby, and Strapi, things that I didn’t know when I was actually building the website (and that would have been useful as a matter of fact).

I don’t know if it’s only me but unless I do have to explain something to someone else, I keep my knowledge of a topic to a surface knowledge: I understand the big picture but I don’t care too much about the details. Some people would feel uncomfortable knowing that they will never know everything about a topic, that they will never become an expert in a field, despite their continuous efforts to achieve it. On my side, I don’t care too much because I consider myself a generalist, and I actually see being an expert as a weakness, not a strength. I actually feel great knowing that I don’t know everything, that I will always learn new stuff even when I’ll be 90 years old (if I ever survive the next seven pandemics of course).

But everything that’s been said in the article so far is just one way of learning when writing. The other one is actually much more interesting, but only if you have an open mind and are humble enough to accept feedback, even if it’s not the most constructive one. If that’s the case, it’s when Cunningham’s law comes to play.

Cunningham's law states that the best way to get the right answer on the internet is not to ask a question, it's to post the wrong answer. So it’s not the end of the world if you don’t get your grammar or your facts straight when writing a piece of something. If you made a mistake, be assured that you’ll know about it, because there will always be this person making it their personal mission to tell you when you’re wrong. Even though the intentions of that kind of people are not necessarily benevolent, it’s still a great way to learn, and to open up to different opinions.

This is so meta...

Whatever you do, being right or being wrong, you’ll learn. That’s also one reason why I decided to write again. It’s so great to share stuff with the world and learn at the same time.

To understand what a static site generator is, let’s use this definition from Cloudflare’s Learning Center:

A static site generator is a tool that generates a full static HTML website based on raw data and a set of templates. Essentially, a static site generator automates the task of coding individual HTML pages and gets those pages ready to serve to users ahead of time. Because these HTML pages are pre-built, they can load very quickly in users' browsers.

That means that when the website is built, you’ll never actually make calculations on the server or access a database, everything has been generated already, and that’s why it’s so fast.

But Gatsby is a little more than just a static site generator. As explained in “What is GatsbyJS?” Mediacurrent’s article:

It uses powerful preconfiguration to build a website that uses only static files for incredibly fast page loads, service workers, code splitting, server-side rendering, intelligent image loading, asset optimization, and data prefetching. All out of the box.

The result is incredible and I had a hard time believing it the first time I tested it on PageSpeed Insights:

This is what you get with Gatsby out of the box!

I decided to go with Gastby instead of similar technologies like Next.js, Hugo, Jekyll, or Nuxt (full list here) because it's something we (but not me directly) use for the websites of Ludus and madewithlove, and I want to be able to knowingly dive into those if it ever becomes necessary.

Gatsby is one of the most prominent flag bearers of the Jamstack architecture, a handy abbreviation coined by Netlify’s CEO Mathias Biilmann which stands for JavaScript, APIs, and Markup.

Again, instead of attempting a somewhat wobbly definition, let’s learn more about Jamstack thanks to this fantastic explanation on Bejamas’ blog:

Today Jamstack refers to a web development architecture that allows developers to rely on a static website’s advantages, including better web performance and security benefits, while still retaining the dynamic attributes of a database-oriented CMS without the database.

Jamstack approach enables you to create fully dynamic sites while the real assets are pre-rendered static files deployed on CDN. The dynamic side of things is handled with client-side JavaScript, usually run through serverless functions.

At this point, I think you understand the static side of things, but the data still needs to come from somewhere, right? Well, yeah, and for that, you’ll want to use a headless CMS. Let’s see what Storyblok says about that:

A headless CMS is a back-end only content management system (CMS) built from the ground up as a content repository that makes content accessible via a RESTful API or GraphQL API for display on any device.

The term “headless” comes from the concept of chopping the “head” (the front end, i.e. the website) off the “body” (the back end, i.e. the content repository). A headless CMS remains with an interface to manage content and a RESTful or GraphQL API to deliver content wherever you need it. Due to this approach, a headless CMS does not care about how and where your content gets displayed. A headless CMS has only one focus: storing and delivering structured content and allowing content editors to collaborate on new content.

I could have gone with Contentful, Ghost, Sanity or Netlify CMS (full list here) but I decided to go with Strapi because at some point you just need to make a decision and stick to it. The thing I liked with Strapi however is that it's actually open-source, that you can use it with your favorite RDBMS (in my case it's PostgreSQL) and even though you can customize everything without writing a line of code via their admin, it will generate a full Node.js codebase that you can modify afterward if you have specific needs, something that a hosted SaaS tool like Contentful doesn't allow. It was important for me to stay on top of my data, and not be vendor locked. Nevertheless, I didn't have to edit the source code generated by Strapi and probably won't have to anytime soon, but it feels good to know that it's possible if I ever need to do it in the future.

In a few words, Strapi allows you to create your models (via what they call the Content-Types Builder), create relationships between them, and set up permissions (who can read, who can write, etc.). After doing that, you can create entries for all these entities from the admin (with a WYSIWYG interface) or use the automatically generated REST or GraphQL APIs.

This is how you create a model with Strapi.

And this is how you create an entry.

I won’t lie, I didn’t come with all these things all by myself, because I pretty much followed this tutorial from the Strapi blog, customizing it a bit here and there to make it look and behave the way I wanted.

From a hosting point of view, I’m using Netlify for the Gatsby part and Heroku for the Strapi part. For the latter, you won’t need much more than the Hobby plan at $7/month because it will only be put to work when you build your website (even Free could work but I wanted to avoid the sleep after inactivity that would’ve lengthened the build time).

From a pure workflow point of view, I currently write all my articles in Craft. When I’m ready to publish, I export it to Markdown and import it inside Strapi. I then manually trigger a deployment on Netlify to get the latest content on my website. This last step could be automated (via Strapi Webhooks) whenever I hit the save button in Strapi, but I haven't taken the time to do it yet.

All in all, I know exactly what you’re thinking: yeah, this is clearly over-engineered. I could simply have written HTML and CSS files and put them on the cheapest host provider I could find. Still, I think it’s worth it in the end because I learned a lot and the end result is simply amazing in terms of speed, something I would have never reached even with the most basic HTML website. Also, I’m not and I will never be a no-code guy, but this probably deserves a blog article on its own (haters gonna hate, stay tuned).

Before I let you go back to what you were doing before reading this article (thanks for reading thus far by the way), I just want to add an extra few words on the fact that this blog will never have ads (or sponsored articles) again and that I will never try to spy on you in any way. I decided to go against surveillance capitalism tools like Google Analytics and use Plausible instead, a very simple analytics tool that gives basic information about my website's usage (but more than enough for my needs) and, more importantly, that respects your privacy.

I like how meta it is. It’s an advice you’re forced to not follow if you want to follow it, because if you follow it, you don’t follow it. That said, I think if there’s only one advice you should follow, it’s that one.

Why is that? There are multiple explanations. I don’t know which one is the most correct, but the truth is probably a combination of all of them.

First of all, we are all different, we all have different companies, and what works for someone will not work for someone else. I recently read somewhere that asking someone how he succeeded is like asking yesterday’s winning lottery numbers. It’s useless.

Then, not everyone has the same definition of success. That’s why I used quotes when I wrote the word “successful” in the first paragraph. For some people, it will be about being rich, making money at all costs. For some others, it will be about social status, being important and/or famous. And for some others, it will be about freedom, not having to work too much (or not at all) to do whatever they want to do with their time. I won’t go too much into details here because I plan to write an article on success but this is a very important thing to keep in mind. For each person on earth, there’s one definition of success.

Also, successful people tend to exaggerate their own brilliance and downplay how luck had a big influence in their success. It’s so much more tempting to think that you made it because you’re a genius (and that you were unlucky if that’s not the case). It’s also linked to what is called the “survivorship bias”. Let’s say that 100 people have used the exact same method to build their company, but only 1 made it out of them. Would you use that method? Of course not. The thing is, we only know about the 1. The others are forgotten because they didn’t make it. When you listen to someone explaining you how he succeeded, don’t forget about the 99 you don’t know about and that did the same thing with a very different result.

Last but not least, even if a founder was successful with 3 different companies using the same method, the sample is statistically too small. You can flip a coin 3 times and it’s not extremely unlikely that you’ll get tails each time. It would give you the impression that flipping a coin will give you tails 100% of the time, which is obviously incorrect (the right answer is 50% if you were wondering). Now if you it flip 1000 times, you will get something like tails 50.7% of the time and heads 49.3% of the time, which is closer to reality. The same way you wouldn’t trust a poll that interviewed only 3 people, you shouldn’t trust the advice of someone who created only 3 companies. To be representative of the reality, you need a bigger sample. But obviously, nobody will ever be successful 1000 times, because life is short. So, if you still want to listen to external advice, take it from many different people and create something new out of that, something that works for you, because success can’t be replicated.

I hope that makes sense but don’t worry if it doesn’t because you should not follow any advice that has been given here anyway. Or should you?

This was obviously stupid because it always felt wrong to me. I started my blog in 2006, before the era of social media, and apart from bringing fantastic professional opportunities, it was always therapy for me. When I felt I needed to express myself on a topic, I could just do it, and when the article was written, it didn’t really matter if it was read by 5 or 5000 people. It was out there, I could do something else.

By not writing for that long, it really started to feel like someone who didn’t have sex for a very long time. There was a buildup of things filling my head and I felt like it was about to explode. It was time to do something about it.

But because not making my life easier is the story of my life (otherwise I wouldn’t do startups), I decided that I would not only write again, I would also completely rebuild my blog from scratch. I didn’t go for classic solutions like WordPress or Medium because I wanted to keep control of the code and the data (especially the data). I also wanted my blog to be extremely fast and mobile-friendly, knowing that these two factors are the most important ones for SEO these days. I chose to build it with Gatsby, a static site generator, aka the Jamstack king. The backend is powered by Strapi but I'll probably write an article about all these technical specificities at another time, it was not the point of this article.

By the way, the title of this article is inspired by Stephen King’s “On Writing”, a book that definitively motivated me to write again. As he suggests, even when I don’t have the inspiration, I will try to write a little something every day, even if it remains in my drafts. It’s the best solution to stay consistent over the long term.

If you want to stay up to date with what I’m writing here, don’t hesitate to subscribe to my RSS feed (yeah, RSS) or to my newsletter.

Talk to you soon!

👉👉👉 NONE 👈👈👈

You read this right: the list is empty.

For a startup, tech events are just a big distraction from what’s really important: being focused on building a great product that people love. Tech events have never been and will never be a great place to discuss with potential investors and prospects. And if you need a break, take a real vacation in an inspirational place, as far away as possible from technology.

Why is that?

It’s simple. We finally arrived at a point where web technologies can compete with native technologies, at least on desktops. We now have awesome frameworks like React, Vue.js, Angular or Ember.js that allows us to go pretty far in terms of interfaces and interactions, when 10 years ago, we were happy to build “2.0” websites by adding some jQuery on top of our HTML and CSS (and those who were not happy were using Flash 😢).

Also, standard technologies like SVG, canvas or WebGL are now starting to become mature and allow web applications to have a native feel. Thus, developing a desktop application both for macOS and Windows, and asking your users to run an installer before being able to use your product doesn’t make sense anymore, especially if you’re a startup with limited resources.

Ludus is itself a combination of React and Fabric.js (an awesome canvas library we recently started contributing to) which makes it very fast and responsive. We use CSS and JavaScript specificities that we couldn’t have used only one year ago, due to limited browser support (for example, the mix-blend-mode CSS property). Things are moving fast!

What about connectivity?

It’s true that most web applications will require an Internet connection to work properly, even though the technology is here to make web applications available offline, to the point that some folks are even pushing for offline first. It’s also true that making this possible probably requires more effort than making a desktop application working offline (which actually requires 0 effort as it is the natural state of a desktop application). But for a web application, is that really an issue not being available offline? The world is more and more connected and looking at how fast things are going, we can expect to be fully connected everywhere we go with super fast 7G connections (or whatever the name will be) within 10 years.

At Ludus, we know that our beloved users are mostly creating their presentations in “safe” environments with good Internet connections, mainly from a corporate office, from a coworking space, or from home. The main issue is the environment where the presentations are given, which is, most of the time, unpredictable. That’s why we focus our efforts on providing good offline alternatives for the viewing experience, not so much for the editing experience, at least for now. What makes Ludus great is all the integrations with external services we offer, like YouTube, GIPHY, Unsplash, CodePen, InVision, Framer, and many more. The PDF export we provide will make you lose all that awesomeness, but at least you have something as a backup in case the people organizing the talk/conference you’re giving didn’t do their job correctly.

Where are my files?

Speaking of PDF, another thing that will probably disappear with everything moving to the web is the concept of files. Even though Ludus will add the possibility to import .pptx and .key and even provide a .lud file format at some point, we think that this notion of files will definitely disappear sooner than later. Don’t get us wrong, we don’t think popular formats like PDF, PNG, or MP4 will vanish tomorrow, we simply think that there is a chance they will be distributed via streams or APIs instead of via files that you physically save on your computer. When this will happen, our hard disks will only be useful for caching. And you know what? It’s actually already what’s happening on your smartphone and your tablet, especially when you’re using apps like Netflix or Spotify. You don’t have File Explorer or Finder on these devices and that almost certainly never bothered you. Quod erat demonstrandum.

Nevertheless, when people ask me to define myself, I don’t really talk about that CTO thing but I tell them I’m a “Product Engineer”. I don’t do technology for the sake of technology. I do technology because it helps me build great products. Why is it important that I tell you that? Because it’s exactly the reason why we decided to build Ludus on top of Heroku.

When I tell people we’re on Heroku, the first reaction is always the same: they tell me that I’m crazy and that Heroku is very expensive. I agree, if you compare to Amazon Web Services, it is expensive. But you know what’s more expensive? Having to hire someone to build and maintain your infrastructure on AWS.

At my previous startup, before we even started to really work on the product, we decided to hire someone to build our infrastructure on AWS, and we were very concerned about using only open sources technologies, so we could reduce the costs. That person did a great job but left the startup after only a few months for personal reasons, and it took us a while to recover from that. At the time, nobody else in the team was qualified to maintain the system so we wasted a lot of precious time trying to make sure the entire thing didn’t collapse. It’s only after two years that we were able to hire someone who cleaned all the mess we created, but the damage was already done.

When I started working on Ludus, I didn’t want to repeat that bad experience. As I was alone to work on the MVP on a very tight budget and timing, I didn’t have a choice anyway. I had to go for a PaaS, and Heroku was my first choice because I liked its power and simplicity, having already used it for side-projects in the past. In only a week, we had a solid infrastructure, the best that I ever witnessed in my entire career. And there is an obvious reason for that: 200+ people are working on it.

Relax. Everything is taken care of.

We currently have 4 microservices and we use GitHub for version control. We have one repository for each microservice and we use Heroku Pipelines to deploy. A push to the development branch will deploy to our staging environment and a push to the master branch will deploy to our production environment. We also do code reviews (with GitHub pull requests) and use Heroku Review Apps to check that the suggested changes can be pushed to production. We also do continuous integration and use Heroku CI to make sure all automated tests pass before deploying to production.

It scales very well. We don’t use it yet but Heroku has something called Autoscaling that adapts the infrastructure to the current traffic. If we had the chance to be featured on TechCrunch tomorrow, it would automatically create more instances of the server to reach the demand and make sure we have 0 downtimes. But even without that, it’s rock solid. We had 100% uptime during our launch on Product Hunt, even though we made 40K+ page views in two days (May 10 & 11).

This is a dream setup, and it helps us focus on our main task: building a product people love.

And you know what? It’s not even that expensive! At this point (October 2017), we pay around $500/month. It will probably go up over time, but it’s always proportional to the amount of traffic we get, so it’s really a first-world problem. In a year or two, if it becomes 10 times more expensive than what we pay now, we can start thinking about hiring someone who will move stuff to AWS and save us some money. We already started and moved a very small microservice from Heroku to AWS Lambda, but we don’t plan to go further than that before long. We are a team of product engineers and taking care of our servers is not part of our job.

In conclusion, know that the most important thing to do when you start working on a new project is to put something in front of your potential users/customers as fast and as often as possible. Something like Heroku will greatly help you and will cost nothing in the beginning, because you’ll get poor traffic at a very early stage of your company (don’t be too depressed about it, it’s actually a great luxury). If Heroku becomes expensive at some point, it’s a great problem to have, and when it does, you’ll probably have the financial power to hire someone to reduce the costs. But honestly, this is a long shot. Don’t clutter your brain with that kind of issue in the beginning. Focus on your product, that’s the only thing that really matters.

As a reminder, Stripe Atlas is a service that helps you start a global business from absolutely anywhere on the planet. For only $500, and in a timely fashion, they incorporate your company in the USA (Delaware, for obvious reasons), they help you open a Silicon Valley Bank account and the Stripe account linked to it. Other perks include $15,000 of AWS Promotional Credits (via AWS Activate) and free (but limited) advising from Orrick and PwC.

When some people (mainly friends and family) became interested in what we were building and wanted to invest some money to help us, we had the obligation to start a legal entity to be able to accept these funds.

Our most serious options were to establish our business in Belgium (as most of the founders are located there) or in the USA. At this point, we applied for Stripe Atlas, without really knowing if (and when) we would be selected.

So why pick the US?

The main advantage to establish a business in the USA is to become a global company. As our business is 100% SaaS with potential customers everywhere on the globe, that makes a lot of sense for us.

Also, if you’re really serious and ambitious about your business (as I think you should be), having an American company can be a big advantage if you want to raise money with a top US investor at some point. Investors are generally not looking for reasons to invest in your business, but for reasons not to invest in your business. For an American investor, not being an American company (and especially not a Delaware one) can be a very good reason to eliminate you without even looking at what you’re doing.

On the other hand, dealing with foreign and unknown laws and regulations can be intimidating, and the USA is not known to be a country where starters receive a lot of financial assistance from the government (which is something very common in Belgium and in the rest of Europe).

Looking back, these two subjects were not such big issues after all. Dealing with American law is not that troublesome because you can find almost everything you’re looking for online. Counselors we had the chance to talk with thanks to Stripe Atlas were very helpful as well.

You also realize that you don’t really need public financial help if you don’t get robbed, to begin with. To create an SPRL/BVBA in Belgium, the capital must be fully subscribed at the time the company is incorporated, to the amount of €18,550 (of which €6,200 must actually be paid up in the account of the SPRL/BVBA). Also, the articles of association must be written before a notary. You need to be physically present in the office of a random guy you never met and will never meet again to make sure that your company can be incorporated.

Can someone please explain to me why this profession still exists and why it’s useful?

Now compare all this to the $500 required by Stripe Atlas, with no questions asked, and you understand why we jumped in the Stripe Atlas train as soon as we got accepted.

Our company is based in Delaware but we might never go there for our entire life.

What happens once you’re on the Stripe Atlas train?

The entire process took about two weeks and was concluded by the reception of our EIN at the end of December. It would have probably taken less than 10 days if we weren’t so slow to read, discuss and sign all the legal documents they handed us (it was during the holidays and we were all very busy eating and drinking).

In hindsight, we should actually have waited a little longer before submitting the signed documents because we had to pay $400 in taxes for the entire year even though our company existed for only a few days in 2016.

Apart from that mistake that we could have easily avoided, everything was super smooth, with emails received at each step of the process, friendly discussions with the Stripe staff, and documents that we could seamlessly sign electronically with DocuSign or HelloSign.

Yes, we are in 2020, no need to print/sign/scan anymore.

After that, we were introduced to a lawyer on UpCounsel and had to pay an extra $250 for a Stripe Atlas post-incorporation package. We had to decide how many total shares our company would have, how many each founder would have, how much time we would vest, what would be the vesting cliff date and how our vesting would accelerate in case of a triggering event (like the acquisition of our company).

$250 is very cheap for putting all these things on official paper. As a comparison, we were asked about €1,500 for something similar in Belgium.

To be able to receive money from our investors, the last step of our process was to write convertible note contracts. A convertible note is a short-term debt that converts into equity. Investors loan money to a startup as its first round of funding and rather than get their money back with interest, they receive shares of the company after the first round of funding (typically a seed or a Series A round).

We decided to go for an improved form of convertible notes called SAFE because they are more entrepreneur-friendly while still being as good as the old thing for the investors. We mainly had to decide what would be the valuation cap and the discount for our super early investors and that was it, we were ready to roll!

Now boarding

In conclusion, I would say that Stripe Atlas was a great facilitator and I recommend it to anyone without a shadow of a doubt. It was super useful to have their support while doing all these things that are very unfamiliar for us simple citizens with zero legal or financial experience. It helped us focus on our main mission which is to build an amazing product that people want to use and pay for.

Il y aura donc 8 sessions techniques lors du prochain KIKK, qui aura lieu du 3 au 5 novembre 2016. Benjamin De Cock (Stripe) nous expliquera pourquoi SVG2 va changer notre façon de faire du web, Yannick Schutz (Heroku) racontera pourquoi le concept de “ChatOps” a le vent en poupe, Philippe Modard (Google) nous révèlera comment scaler une application basée sur les WebSockets, Loïc Vigneron (Spin42) nous montrera comment il a construit un drone avec une imprimante 3D, Fabien Penso (Stuart) exposera comment il a réalisé (avec énormément de succès) une migration depuis une architecture monolithique (PHP) vers des microservices (RoR) en à peine quelques mois, Arnaud Coomans (Facebook) nous fera découvrir les méthodes de travail suivies par les ingénieurs chez Facebook et Instagram, Fabrice Lejeune (Dogstudio) nous fera reconsidérer l’utilisation des frameworks Web, et Michaël Uyttersprot (FitBit) nous prouvera que ce n’est pas forcément bizarre de placer les termes “Halloween” et “Bluetooth LE” dans la même phrase. Pour plus de détails, je vous invite à aller jeter un oeil au programme officiel sur le tout nouveau (et tout beau) site du KIKK 2016.

Merci à tous les speakers, qui ont parfois accepté de faire presque 9000 kilomètres pour se rendre à Namur et merci à Gilles de m’avoir pris au mot et d’avoir rendu ça possible. Merci également à Marie, Susie et tous les autres pour tout le boulot abattu dans les coulisses, et qui fait que le KIKK est devenu une des plus belles conférences d’Europe !

À très bientôt, à Namur.

Commençons par le travail. Il faut se rendre à l’évidence, de manière générale, nous ne sommes plus tout à fait heureux dans nos boulots. Nous vivons aujourd’hui dans un monde de possibilités et d’opportunités mais nous choisissons encore de travailler dans de vieilles corporations faites de structure, rigidité, hiérarchie et cupidité. Jour après jour, nous nous tuons au travail, parfois au détriment de notre santé physique et mentale, afin de nous permettre un niveau de vie dont nous ne pouvons profiter que durant le week-end. Nous travaillons avec des gens que nous n’aimons pas particulièrement, sur des sujets qui ne nous passionnent pas vraiment, afin de gagner suffisamment d’argent pour acquérir des biens dont nous n’avons pas le temps d’apprécier. Il doit forcément y avoir une meilleure approche.

De nombreux signes montrent que nous entrons tout doucement dans une nouvelle ère que Paul Mason nomme “postcapitalisme”. La croissance est faible voire inexistante, nous sommes de plus en plus nombreux et beaucoup de jobs disparaissent à cause de l’automatisation. Nous allons devoir apprendre à vivre des vies plus simples qui privilégient les expériences par rapport aux possessions matérielles. De toute façon, avions-nous vraiment besoin de posséder trois voitures et une maison avec huit chambres et quatre salles de bain ? On parle aussi de plus en plus d’économie de partage ou encore d’uberisation. Ce ne sont pas uniquement des buzzwords, et même si ces nouveaux concepts ont encore aujourd’hui quelques ratées, ils mettent réellement en évidence une nouvelle façon de fonctionner de notre société. Il est désormais possible de paralleliser plusieurs petits jobs en aménageant soi-même son horaire tout en ayant encore la possibilité de profiter de la vie. Dans son livre “One Person/Multiple Careers“, Marci Alboher parle de “slash careers” pour décrire ce travailleur du futur qui cumule plusieurs métiers. Nos parents avaient l’habitude de faire le même métier dans la même boîte durant toute leur carrière. La génération suivante a pris l’habitude de changer de boîte tous les trois à cinq ans en grimpant les échelons dans un domaine bien précis. Le futur, c’est de faire plusieurs métiers totalement différents dans sa vie, et parfois au même moment. L’hyperspécialisation est dépassée et est même devenue dangereuse si le domaine dans lequel nous avons une certaine expertise devient obsolète. La vraie sécurité de l’emploi en 2016, c’est d’avoir plus d’une corde à son arc et d’avoir un réseau important sur lequel on peut s’appuyer en cas de pépin, comme l’explique Keith Ferrazzi dans son livre “Never Eat Alone“. Si on suit la logique de cette théorie, le freelance est celui qui serait à l’abri, pas l’employé.

Après, pour pouvoir accomplir autant de choses dans une seule vie, il faut pouvoir sans cesse se renouveler et apprendre en continu. C’est le concept de “lifelong learning” dont j’ai déjà parlé sur ce blog. Ce que devraient nous enseigner les écoles n’est donc pas une connaissance poussée dans un certain domaine précis. Elles devraient nous apprendre à apprendre. C’est particulièrement vrai dans un domaine comme l’informatique dans lequel je suis baigné depuis que j’ai terminé mes études. Les choses changent tellement vite qu’il faut s’accrocher et se mettre à jour continuellement pour ne pas être dépassé. Aussi, durant toutes ces années, j’ai au la chance de bosser avec pas mal de gens qui sont d’excellents programmeurs, mais qui n’ont jamais été diplômés en informatique. Personnellement, j’ai passé une bonne demi-douzaine d’entretiens d’embauche dans ma vie et on ne m’a jamais demandé de montrer mon diplôme. On m’a uniquement posé des questions techniques et fait faire des exercices pour voir de quoi j’étais capable. Je trouve ça parfaitement normal. Le plus important est ce qu’on sait faire, pas un bout de papier officiel qu’on a reçu quand on était encore adolescent. Ce qui est vrai dans le domaine de l’informatique le sera peut-être bientôt dans tous les domaines.

Un autre sujet dans lequel le domaine de l’informatique est sans doute un peu en avance, c’est celui du télétravail (remote work). Pour le genre de boulot que je fais actuellement, les deux seules choses dont j’ai besoin sont un ordinateur portable suffisamment puissant et une connexion Internet un peu correcte. Même si certains CEOs d’un autre âge comme Marissa Mayer pensent que tous être sous le même toit est la clé de la réussite (ainsi que bosser le week-end), je suis convaincu qu’une grosse majorité du travail d’un informaticien peut être abattue en solo, de n’importe où. Cela a d’autant plus de sens quand on essaye de lancer sa startup et qu’on essaye de limiter les coûts. Pourquoi le faire depuis une ville onéreuse comme New York ou Paris alors qu’un pays comme la Thaïlande offre une qualité de vie égale (voire meilleure) pour un dixième du prix ? Évidemment, tout ça ne s’applique pas à tous les jobs. Un serveur dans un restaurant ne pourra probablement jamais travailler en remote.

Nous sommes probablement aussi à l’aube d’un nouveau type d’organisations. Comme je l’expliquais plus haut, nous ne sommes plus heureux dans nos boulots. C’est en partie à cause du rythme de vie effréné que nous nous imposons mais aussi à cause du type de structures rigides et hiérarchisées dans lesquelles nous évoluons. Une des raisons principales pour laquelle les gens quittent leur boulot est la mésentente avec leur manager direct. La question qu’il faut se poser dans ce cas, c’est : avons-nous vraiment besoin de managers ? Si nous sommes compétents dans ce que nous faisons, avons-nous vraiment besoin de quelqu’un qui nous surveille, nous évalue et nous impose des règles ? Certains pensent que oui et d’autres non, et tous ont raison. Ce sont les théories X et Y dont j’ai déjà parlé ici. Frederic Laloux fait partie de ceux qui pensent que l’être humain est bon de nature et est totalement capable de s’autogérer. Dans son livre “Reinventing Organizations“, il décrit un nouveau type d’organisations qu’il nomme “teal” (turquoise) et dont le principe de base est que chacun est responsable de son propre travail et n’a besoin de personne d’autre que lui-même pour savoir ce qu’il a à faire. Ceci n’est pas de la science fiction. Certains boîtes renommées utilisent déjà cette façon de fonctionner avec énormément de succès. Dans ce genre de structures, les gens sont beaucoup plus épanouis et le taux de démission est ridiculement bas.

Si on veut encore aller plus loin, une autre question que l’on pourrait se poser est : avons-nous vraiment besoin de travailler ? Est-ce vraiment un passage obligé pour être heureux ? Personnellement, je suis passionné par ce que je fais si bien que souvent, je n’ai même pas l’impression que je travaille. Je sais néanmoins que tout le monde n’est pas dans cet état d’esprit, et c’est parfaitement compréhensible. Pourquoi les gens qui n’aiment pas travailler devraient-ils être obligés de faire quelque chose qui les répugne pour pouvoir profiter d’une vie un peu décente ? Ne serait-il pas temps de mettre en place un revenu minimum garanti ? Cela permettrait à quiconque de pouvoir vivre dignement mais permettrait aux gens plus entreprenants de pouvoir se libérer d’un job qui sert à payer les factures pour enfin pouvoir consacrer du temps à ses vraies passions, que ça rapporte de l’argent ou pas. Pour ma part, je suis convaincu que cela ferait beaucoup de bien à l’économie. Les gens qui font les choses par passion sont les gens qui ont le plus de réussite. Si du jour au lendemain, nous consacrions tous 100% de notre temps à des choses qui nous animent vraiment au lieu de faire semblant d’être occupés en attendant le week-end, je pense que cela ne pourra qu’avoir un impact positif sur le bien-être et la prospérité de notre civilisation.

Notre bien-être sera d’autant plus étincelant quand nous aurons finalement compris le fonctionnement du corps humain et repris notre santé en main, ce qui nous permettra de jouir de plus d’énergie pendant de plus longues années et de mener nos projets à bien de façon plus efficace. Le fait de ne plus devoir subir les pots d’échappements des voitures devrait sans doute aider également, aussi bien pour notre santé que notre planète. Dans quelques décénnies, notre énergie viendra uniquement de sources renouvelables et nous ne produirons quasiment plus aucun déchet. Les voitures électriques prendront bientôt le dessus si bien que nos enfants et petits-enfants se moqueront de nous en sachant qu’on ait pu vivre si longtemps dans des villes aussi bruyantes et polluées. Outre le fait que le taux de mortalité au volant va devenir extrêmement insignifiant, l’arrivée des voitures autonomes qui peuvent communiquer entre elles va aussi réduire fortement le trafic et libérer notre réseau routier. Le concept d’embouteillage ne sera bien vite qu’un lointain souvenir. Les parkings ne seront plus nécessaires et seront probablement remplacés par des piétonniers et des espaces verts. Nos villes dans l’ensemble seront plus vivables et plus agréables. Toutefois, au vu de tout ce dont nous avons discuté plus haut, nous aurons moins que jamais besoin de vivre dans des villes et un exode massif vers les campagnes est sans doute à prévoir. Ce sera l’occasion de reconnecter avec la nature et de prendre le temps d’observer la beauté de notre planète.

Je pourrais encore aborder et creuser beaucoup d’autres sujets mais en substance, ceci est le beau futur que j’entrevois. Je sais néanmoins que tout ça ne se fera pas tout seul donc j’ai décidé de me mettre au boulot dès à présent. La meilleure façon de prédire l’avenir c’est de l’inventer !

Après de longues réflexions, j’ai décidé de nommer le livre “Petit guide du Bon Mangeur“. “Bon mangeur” et par extension “bien manger” sont des expressions plutôt ambiguës. Cela peut vouloir dire qu’on mange de façon satisfaisante ou qu’on mange de façon saine. Nous avons aujourd’hui une conception de la nourriture qui est de se dire que si c’est savoureux, c’est probablement mauvais pour la santé, et inversement. On nous dit qu’on doit manger moins gras, moins sucré, moins salé, mais si on enlève toutes ces choses de notre nourriture, où est le plaisir ?

Ce livre n’est pas une bible dans laquelle sont avancées des croyances un peu vagues et il ne promeut en aucun cas un nouveau type de régime. L’ambition de cet ouvrage est de ne présenter que des faits avérés. Certaines choses que nous bannissons à tort depuis des décennies sont parfaitement saines et doivent à nouveau être consommées en lieu et place des substituts artificiels que nous leur avons préférés pendant si longtemps. Les vrais ennemis ne sont pas ce que nous croyons et il est tout à fait possible de manger sainement et de façon satisfaisante en même temps. Nous méritons tous d’enfin pouvoir vivre une vie heureuse dans laquelle nous n’avons plus peur de la nourriture et dans laquelle nous ne sommes plus sans cesse au régime !

J’espère que vous lirez ce livre avec intérêt et que cela pourra vous aider si vous êtes en constant conflit avec le contenu de votre assiette, comme je l’étais encore il y a quelques années. Le livre est encore très imparfait et tout feedback est extrêmement précieux pour moi donc n’hésitez surtout pas si vous remarquez quelque chose de louche. Merci d’avance et bonne lecture !