A year in review: 2020
[Disclaimer: work in progress]
Following the lead of Taylor Barnett, I decided to build a list of what I did during this special year. My main goal with that post is to remember all the cool things that happened in 2020 and all the most notable things I achieved (like a huge feel good jar).
Blog posts
I wrote 4 blog posts on Doctolib’s medium account. A bit of tech, a bit of organization, and a bit of management:
- So, what’s the fuss about those “Fresh eyes reports”, Doctolib? (Feb 7, 2020)
- One to three deployments per day: push where it hurts (Apr 16, 2020)
- Understanding and fixing N+1 query (Jul 10, 2020)
- Becoming an Engineering Manager (Dec 3, 2020)
Events
I participated and co-organized several events:
- Wild Code School Hackathon: >400 attendees. 13 Coaches. 3 Winners.
- Microsoft Roadshow Fall 2020: Charity bike run + Tech talks + Quantum computing trainings.
- Start and Restart of the Contribute events: An event to help aspiring open source contributors start their first PR.
- Co-authored Doctolib’s Code of Conduct
Talks
I had the chance to speak at several events about what we do at Doctolib:
- Paris.rb (Feb 2020): Knowledge management with Mélanie Bérard
- MUG Orléans (Oct 2020): Tribal Knowledge VS Automation
- MUG Orléans (Oct 2020): How our company of 1500 people (Doctolib) went remote over the weekend
- MUG Tours (Oct 2020): How to manage your legacy code
Videos
I built/directed/starred in several videos:
- Interview about the Wild Code School Hackathon
- Interviews “DevsInFrance” (8 interviews)
- Roadshow with Doctolib Tech Life - Meetup
- Roadshow with Doctolib Tech Life - Les Blouses Roses
- Roadshow with Doctolib Tech Life - Body
- Roadshow with Doctolib Tech Life - Story
- Xavier’s interview about the good parts of being a fullstack dev at Doctolib
Coaching
I spent countless hours coaching people at Doctolib on:
- How to write efficiently a good blog post
- How to structure your ideas in order to tell a good story
- How to structure a talk
- Individual management topics
- Social media bootcamp
- Building and organizing a training
- Organizing and hosting an online meetup
- How to work remotely
Code
- Added and removed a few lines of code in the Doctolib’s monolith, based on our Patient Identity Management roadmap (Data mode migration with relation cardinality changes over massive tables (several hundred millions records))
- Greenhouse tag matrix migration: I built a tool that cleaned and updated 100k candidates profiles in our ATS (which does not allow batch iterations over custom fields) in a couple of days.
- I participated to the Advent Of Code, and ended up 2nd on the Doctolib’s internal leaderboard (I’m not obsolete yet! Yay!).
- I discovered quantum computing and Q#, and trained a few students
3D Printing
I learned about 3D printing during the first national lockdown and made it a hobby of mine:
- Bought a French Dagoma 3D printer
- Learned about Cura by Dagoma (a custom version of Cura)
- Fought with my printer to get it to work with the official Cura release and won
- Installed an Octoprint instance on a raspberry pi, configured a webcam on it and a ngrok tunnel and started to print things when not at home (Yay, video streaming!)
- Decided to offer myself a nice 40th birthday gift and bought a Prusa MK3S
- Waited almost 2 months to get it 😅
- Got it, built it, loved it
- Started to build my own models with Tinkercad
- Tried Blender
- Learned a bit of OpenSCAD (enough to build a door holder)
- Tried Fusion 360
- Built a ton of functional stuff (door holder, laptop stand, webcam support, smartphone holder, etc)
Interesting reads
- My throwback read: The Belgariad and The Malloreon (David Eddings). I read it every 20 years 🤓
- Best management read: The manager’s path, by Camille Fournier (Super useful book that walk you through all the steps of tech management, from tech lead to engineering director)
- Developers job is not about writing code, by Aleksandra Sikora
Misc/Unusual
- I did ride a bike for >430km during the Microsoft Roadshow and helped raise more than 4k euros for “Les Blouses Roses” (a French charity taking care of kids and elders).
- Brewed a successful batch of Pale Ale with a custom recipe.