Splitting light

Season 3 Episode 06

A learning from Gaspard: delegate If you are no longer interested in the newsletter, please unsubscribe​

End of July 2019​
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In August 2019 Gaspard (a) joined Scaleway to manage the storage team. This was a big change for me. Gaspard was the last person at Scaleway that I consider a mentor.

Although he had prior storage experience, his experience was on consumer facing devices. He had worked for Lacie which had subsequently been acquired by Seagate. He had met us a few weeks back one evening in the underground cafeteria of the office. After Théo’s (b) departure, Arnaud (c) had organized a small meeting to introduce him to us, and introduce us to him. It served multiple goals. It stabilized the storage team and we got to meet our new manager. Gaspard also attended the 2019 Scaleday, which was organized in the DC4 datacenter, 40 meters (120 feet) above the Carbon14 bunker. It was themed around space and the end of that event was a daring space themed escape game. It was a lot of fun.

Gaspard was clear about his knowledge on cloud products. I took it upon myself to upskill him. I explained the products positioning as well as their advantages and weaknesses. The legacy systems, object storage, block storage and the future filesystem product. Every single system under our watch was explained. Both from a high level technical perspective and from a product business perspective. I showed him around the systems and introduced him to the right people. We spent a lot of time together. His first few months were most likely intense. I remember him taking a lot of notes on a paper notebook. Something I only started to do 7 years later. His steadiness and calmness was something the team needed greatly at that time.

One thing surprised me with Gaspard. I wanted to empower him. So I gave him access to the databases and gave him the ability to do queries. I started to explain how he could query data and what he had to be careful about. He quickly said no. He was not going to write PromQL and SQL queries.

At first I was confused. Why would someone not want the power to do the queries? After a short time, I understood why. I had the necessary toolset and skills to do those queries and dashboard efficiently. I knew what to be careful of. He didn’t. His leverage was not creating dashboards. His leverage was using those dashboards. His leverage was interfacing the dashboards with the rest of the company. The dashboards were empowering him to do complex actions to push for specific points to the leadership. It was his fuel. This was my very first lesson with him. It became etched in my neural circuitry.

That etching has now taken root. I now understand that you need distance. If you try to do everything yourself, no matter how empowering it is, you lose your focus. Doing systems becomes a goal in itself. However, by doing that, you forget what matters. You forget to build abstraction layers in real life, with people. You forget to put boundaries. You forget because you become so focused in putting those abstractions in your software. It becomes addictive.

I now appreciate the distance. I put artificial barriers. I don’t try to do everything myself. It’s scary to not have full control of everything. It’s scary to have people do things a different way than what I think is best. But, realistically, it would have taken me 20 years to do what the team did in 1 year. Instead of pushing for control, I try to embrace letting go of control. I can’t do everything myself. Delegation matters. How you delegate matters. It took me a long time to understand, 4 years I would say.

But, going back to August 2019, an event was approaching very quickly. That event was a General Availability release for an S3 feature. This one was special for me. It is a thread that still runs.

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1. ​https://x.com/Scaleway_fr/status/1139133333240188928​
2. ​https://x.com/Scaleway_fr/status/1139151379853979648​
3. ​https://x.com/Scaleway_fr/status/1138869252998541314​
4. ​https://x.com/Scaleway_fr/status/1139154639289573376​
5. ​https://x.com/Scaleway_fr/status/1139230169309294592​

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(a) Gaspard Plantrou, VP of storage and database back then, now CPO at Numspot

(b) Théotime Rivière, Storage Product Manager then, now Founder of Freedom From Scratch

(c) Arnaud de Bermingham, Founder and CEO of Scaleway at the time, now CEO of OpCore (datacenter focus spin-off of Scaleway)

(d) Gregoire De Turckheim, Manager of the hardware lab in season 1 & 2, now doing R&D at Scaleway

(e) Laurent Uber, director of datacenter operations back then, now CTO at OpCore (datacenter focus spin-off of Scaleway)

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

To pair with :

• 4r Da Squaw - Isaiah Rashad
• EALREADY