[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:

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:

Videos

I built/directed/starred in several videos:

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.