November 2017, the cloud industry was now booming. AWS was 11 years old, Azure was 9 years old, GCP was 6 years old and Oracle Cloud was now 2 years old. For me, the adventure continued but on a different wavelength. I had jumped energy level, and it was a whole new light.

The storage team was created. There were initially five of us. Me, the lead engineer, Théo the manager and three other engineers: Folays, Florent and Loic. We were given two targets to achieve. A public distributed object storage product and a public distributed block storage product. Since many people were shuffling around in new teams, we took that time to look into both products. I had never used either and, frankly, I didn’t even know they existed beforehand. So I spent some time figuring out what they were. I still had to perform my duties in the lab until a replacement was recruited.

Part of that time was moving the lab to the new office, where it would reside on the last floor, surrounded by old servers mother boards that had been mounted on the walls. The lab was one of the first teams to move and storage moved not that far after. This new office was something else. I consider myself lucky to have worked there.

The building, close to the iconic Champs Elysée avenue in Paris, was a very old Manor. In French, a private hotel, “un hôtel particulier”. An oil magnate, Calouste Gulbenkian had it built in the late 1800. Xavier Niels, the founder of Free & Iliad, a major telecommunication operator in Europe, which Scaleway belonged to, had bought it a few years back. Everything inside was a historical monument and damage to anything inside was considered as a crime under French law.

That did not discourage Arnaud from transforming that enormous manor into a wonderful office. However, a few adjustments had to be made. Electricity and the network had to come down from the chimneys. The wiring inside the walls were old 110V paper wires, it was too risky to plug anything inside them. We used the service elevator as we didn’t want to damage the main one, partly made of silver. Hot, and cold, air was pushed through air built in air ducts inside the building. It was interesting to have a reminder of “the future is already here, just not evenly distributed (1)” which was already true a century back. Central air heating and elevators in the late 1800 where most of Paris still has neither nowadays. The top floor had a terrace which had an amazing view over Paris and an above ground pool was installed inside the underground wine cellar. Several arcades as well as a pool table were also installed.

All this was nice, but for me, the most important thing about that place was the extremely high ceilings and the room themes. We did not have an assigned desk and we could go anywhere to work. The couches in the lobby, the desks in the jungle room, or being surrounded by lucky cats. It didn’t matter. Some rooms had rules, there were a few silent ones, some had external monitors and some didn’t.

The biggest room had inflatable pink flamingos as well as three giant portraits meant to inspire us. One of Xavier, one of Jeff and one of Elon. Different times. My personal favorite? The music room! Top floor, a turn table & records, a bluetooth dongle hooked to a high definition sound system and very comfortable carpet and couches. The best place.

We were required to wear slippers, remember, we couldn’t damage the marble or wood flooring. It was called “La maison”, or in english “Home”. All this was nice but we still had to deliver.

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If you have missed it, you can read the previous episode here​

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To pair with :

• Throwing lines - Kelly Lee Owens
• Cousin Bette (La Cousine Bette) by Honoré de Balzac