Monthly Archives: July 2012

The ad precedence

Where the pressure comes from

We’re working under pressure at work to release a sport website covering the olympics for Wednesday, since the olympics start next Friday. And there is still a lot of work to do. I finally understood where the pressure comes from.

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How to play a video when there is no play button

Is ui tested on rats and monkeys first, or just on geeks?

I come back from a lipdub session where we wanted to make a fun video in front of the Eiffel Tower for my friend, the bride to be. I was filming the movie so I got to interact with the camera, it was my friend’s camera. First take : the actors played their part. It seemed great. Then we wanted to view the video to confirm, that’s when our real mission started : play the video. Impossible.

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Nursing machines : engineers really have it easy

Saturday I made an interesting encounter, I met a nurse. We met at a bachelor party I organized for a very good friend. It was an adventurous race through Paris where I had designed some cool and fun actions to complete for my friend (nothing to do with dirty bachelor parties, it was in the afternoon !!!). So that’s in between actions that I got to talk with the nurse.

But where are the engineers ?!!

While we were racing in the street, she told me she was glad because for once she didn’t have to work on Saturday. “Really ?!!”, I naively said. Then she went on and introduced her job. She explained it and described all the stress she had to go through. I was kind of shocked by what she shared with me. She said that the patients were plugged to a pumping machine that was used to pump their blood, and often this machine would break down and SHE had to fix it as quickly as possible. Her words were “when that happens I need to fix it and nobody knows how to fix it, I mean I’m not an engineer, but I do have to fix the machine, so sometimes I just fix it by intuition thanks to previous experiences, sometimes I just know what I should do, sometimes I don’t and the engineers are not there”. My immediate reaction was “but where are the engineers???!”, “No idea”, she said. Incredible.

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My first coding dojo

This morning our coding best practice guru made us do our first coding dojo. I had no idea what that was, for me “dojo” vaguely referred to a javascript library. But actually, “dojo” is the Japanese word for the place where students practice their martial art. So by extent a coding dojo is a coding exercise where devs practice their code. Aha!

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Moonrise deploy, the dev’s ticket to freedom

How we deploy in production

Friday 9:00 pm, I’m the last one to leave work. I had to finish coding a block for the next day that became priority 1 at 5 pm. Burnt. To add to the sudden panic/weird aura, friday was the day we decided to start a new tradition of drinking and chatting after work at 5pm, right in the open space. So after 2 beers, crackers and a tomato, I went back coding. It was already almost done, but I still needed to test it. Then everybody went home but me.

On my way to leave the office, I suddenly looked at the deserted place differently and noticed the tv we had installed just for us. It was beautiful.

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