Around mid June 2019

In May 2019, Scaleway’s cloud was now in its fifth year of existence. We were leaving the Bulgenkian residence, the Iena home, to a full building in the 8th district of Paris. Although the new office, the Roquepine home, was great by all standards it could not match nor would it ever match the Iena one. From an out of world place to a fancy office. Different categories.

At the same time, the cost of speed had caught up with me. It wasn’t an issue of paying tech debt down, it was getting human debt collected. In my mind, I needed to change. I had to hold too many contradictory emotions. I could not handle it. A few friends tried to recruit me. Many companies were interested in my profile but from my perspective, not to be disrespectful, what they offered, the day to day tasks, after all these adventures, felt boring to me.

Building an API was child’s play. So simple compared to the last years of work. One interviewer actually told me that he thought I was the most qualified candidate, but he had chosen someone else because the candidate had been more enthusiastic during the interview process. I wholeheartedly agreed with him. Some interviews stalled. I didn’t bother to turn in the recruiting exercises I was given.

One company stood out during this time. It was Sqreen. This startup was building agents to prevent cyber security risks by inspecting what was happening. Similar to Datadog but for cybersecurity. Interestingly, Datadog later on acquired them. They had a role to work on the PHP Agent. It was written in C. I knew some of the challenges of PHP security. Both that and the C programming languages made it an interesting opportunity for me.

I made a mock PHP agent in C as an interview exercise. Doing it in just over 3h with no prior experience. They were looking for someone who had deep experience in this domain. I was confident I would pick the skills very quickly. This had always happened so far. Ever since I had started working in my first internships back in 2007. They suggested a Golang or Python role, but I didn’t want to work on these languages. They were not attractive to me. During one of the interviews, I had basically laid out the design for the Python agent. It wasn’t going to be challenging. I insisted on the PHP role. It was the most interesting role to me. Eventually they declined to hire me.

By then, most of the tiredness and sadness from the hardware lab redundancy had lifted. Because the period was slightly calmer, I was resting more and getting energy back. I didn’t understand at the time that by resting I was paying my human debt back. My mind and will were completely disconnected from my body. I had racked a lot of my human debt, or otherwise said my time and my energy. I had borrowed from my time and energy to push forward the storage team. By taking a break from constantly pushing forward, I was able to repay some of that debt.

I had rested. My mind was clearer now. I was no longer as interested in changing jobs as a few months back. Nothing really seemed to be challenging more than what I was doing at Scaleway. I decided to have a meeting with Arnaud, then the CEO of Scaleway. If I were to stay, I wanted to see what options were available to me. Scaleway was, and still is, growing, there were many opportunities and many products to work on.

1. ​https://www.scaleway.com/en/careers/​
2. ​https://www.welcometothejungle.com/en/companies/scaleway​
3. ​Arnaud de Bermingham, Founder and CEO of Scaleway at the time, now CEO of OpCore (datacenter focus spin-off of Scaleway)

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

To pair with :

• Slush puppy - King Krule
• Dandelion Wine by Ray Bradbury