About

After a math-heavy preparatory program in Strasbourg — the one mostly famous for teaching you how to survive without sleep — I landed at Grenoble INP for a telecommunications engineering degree (ENSIMAG/ENSERG, Distributed Applications and Networks track), earned with honors in 2006 — my most serious academic achievement, before discovering you could also take fun seriously — and dove straight into software development. I never really came back up, and I'm not particularly looking to.

Since then I've moved between large industrial accounts (EDF, Bull/Atos/Eviden, Thales, IBM, Orange) and smaller structures, never really letting go of the keyboard — including the year I also wrote about video games and tech for the press, in parallel: the one job where reading magazines counted as work.

In 2023, a friend asked me to join him in co-founding a tech company: AI solutions for businesses, with three co-founders (him, his father and me), and on my side run on evenings, weekends and vacation days, since I was keeping my day job. Spoiler: a spectacular flop on the business side. I learned that you can talk about AI with a great deal of confidence without necessarily knowing how to build any (confidence often being inversely proportional to technical skill), and that some people have what I'd call a creative relationship with the truth. The first doubts came from very upbeat pitches that the numbers struggled to keep up with. Then our employees sounded the alarm, telling me about communication problems and stories that changed from one day to the next. The co-founder meetings that followed turned into a disaster, culminating in this gem: better not to put anything in writing, because written words "always get misinterpreted." The height of irony: he told me so in writing. Translation: a verbal agreement is worth exactly the word of whoever gave it. In this case, not much. I eventually jumped ship, leaving behind several tens of thousands of euros (the venture's only fundraising round: one-way, straight out of my own pocket) and hundreds of unpaid hours.

And yet, it's the experience that taught me the most on a human level, and one that gave me some incredibly rich relationships. First, one of our employees, who became my best friend, and whom my co-founders let go with all the grace they could muster — that is, none — once they realized she'd stopped buying their tall tales. Along the way, they tried to turn us against each other. Didn't work. Then, friends and family whose support never wavered, who kept me standing when everything was shaking. And of course, the experience helped me clear out the relationships that weren't worth keeping ("It's a failure, we need to draw the conclusions," one of my co-founders told me at the time — without realizing I'd apply that exact advice to our own relationship...). Lessons learned: don't mistake friendship for blind trust, and put everything in writing. Always. The best failure of my life, in a way.

After the co-founding adventure, back to a proven business model: a written employment contract and an employer who pays a salary on a fixed date. Business plan validated, no fundraising required. Since October 2026, I'm therefore a Senior DevOps Engineer at Bull, on the very project where I was already a contractor. My pods restart on their own, my pipelines go green (sometimes), and my contract is finally permanent: of the whole infrastructure, it's the most stable component. ISAC Informatique (new tab) is dormant, just like my freelance weekends. The CV has the full story, if spreadsheets speak to you more than jokes do.

Outside of work is where things get serious: a homelab running around the clock (a good outage is basically my idea of fun), a bit of home automation, plenty of keeping up with new tech, and a controller that gets a decent workout too — racing games, city builders, Civilization (with the occasional FPS to unwind), Lego... too much Lego... way too much Lego (plus some CaDA, and Mattel Brick Shop sets...), and long board game nights (Terraforming Mars, Miniville...). I also plow through comic books, mostly Franco-Belgian ones, at a rate that worries my bookshelves — godspeed, BESTÅ, BILLY, and KALLAX. And racing games aren't the only place I go full throttle: I'm also a dedicated badminton player at the La Tronche club (new tab), where I'm also treasurer and webmaster — because someone has to keep track of the lost shuttlecocks and keep the website updated.