To be able to use OpenIO and offer it as a public facing product we had to amass quite a large amount of knowledge. We had to understand how it worked in detail. We had to understand the hardware requirements as well as how we wanted to make it filled and cabled. We had to understand how Scaleway’s information system worked and how we would connect to it.

This phase was a lot of talking to people. From OpenIO’s support engineers to the network team, the hardware vendors and IAM & billing team amongst others.

We wrote documents, did schematics, and experimented. We tested sample hardware trying to understand limits. Pushing the storage mediums to their limits. We were able to select our servers with that. We understood how S3 was billed and with that how we would have to plug in to be able to emit telemetry. We understood better the authentication mechanism and how quota worked.

​Théo did business projections and a complete business plan to present for validation. How we would sell it, how much we needed to sell to break even, how we would grow it…

At this point it is fair to mention books that had a very heavy influence on me at that time. Just like Algorithms in C, Fundamentals, Data Structures, Sorting, Searching, and Graph Algorithms by Robert Sedgewick and Advanced C++ Programming Styles and Idiomsby James O. Coplien had had an enormous influence when I was studying at university, changing my perspective of the craft of programming, this time it was three books that did that job.

The first one was Skunk Works: A Personal Memoir of My Years at Lockheed by Ben R. Rich, the second was the heavy weight Designing Data-Intensive Applications by Martin Kleppmann and the last one was Failure is Not an Option: Mission Control From Mercury to Apollo 13 and Beyond by Gene Kranz. The last one inspired a heavy sense of mission in me. The combo of these three gems put three words in my head. The three words to follow.

Excellence, reliability, redundancy.

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1) Image from https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/101438.Skunk_Works​

(2) Image from https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/23463279-designing-data-intensive-applications​

(3) Image from https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/634874.Algorithms_in_C_Parts_1_5​

(4) Image from https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/756249.Advanced_C_Programming_Styles_and_Idioms​

(5) Image from https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/141499.Failure_is_Not_an_Option​

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

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To pair with :

• Running in the night - FM-84, Ollie Wride, Josep & Kane remix
• Valérian et Laureline l'Intégrale (Not sure if translated in english) by Pierre Christin, Jean-Claude Mézières