November 2024
Whew, time flies!
I have been at poolside for a bit more than a year now, and what a change! I miss my colleagues from Inria, where I had a great time, and I’m super happy at poolside. It’s an amazing job with tough challenges, a lot of work to accomplish and a truly kind hearted team. I’m working on slightly different things, and my main tasks vary week by week. But I’m still mainly working with building datasets from dirty web content. Ingestion, filtering, yadda yadda yadda. Oh but now it’s also code! It’s an interesting challenge vs. natural language. There are lots of problems that can arise (yes, we can’t deduplicate if err != nil in go codebases, or else we’re cooked) and also lots of new heuristics that can be built! What’s missing me the most right now is that I don’t write Rust as often as I used to, but this can be solved via other means. I have a few ideas I’d like to explore, and why not make it double the fun and 10 times harder by doing it in async Rust.
The only project I have done since the last update is letterstonks, and weirdly enough it is actually working. It’s not rocket science at all, but I wanted to observe something and built something to do so. yay!
Hobbies wise I have spent less time creating stuff and I miss it. I think once you make something a habit it quickly becomes a time gas and slowly eats your free time away. It’s then a game of taking back control and trying to find the next time gas. Hopefully it will be something that fulfills my creative side. Maybe photography or electronic music again.
August 2021
I’m currently working at Inria’s ALMAnaCH team, on OSCAR as a R&D Engineer! I’m very happy to be working on open-source initiatives, in one of my favourite domains, using one of my favourite languages 👀.
I recently published my first paper about Ungoliant and I’m thrilled to continue working on the project, improving both code quality and performance. I also timidly submitted small PRs in two Rust projects, and am eager to begin contributing more largely to OSS.
In the last months I’ve been working on personal projects too, notably:
- videoclub, a movie ranking site with a unique take on ranking. Backend is done in Rust, but the whole project is nothing much than a UI POC. I recently shut down the droplet where videoclub was running. While I may continue working on videoclub someday, it won’t be before some months.
I’m currently working on other things that I’ll keep under wraps for now.
Hobbies-wise, I’m still biking every now and then, since my bike is my primary way of transportation. I currently ride a Triban RC520 Gravel and a beaten down 6KU fixed gear bicycle that I’m looking to replace. I also got back to doing photography. I’m tweeting my photographs on the Twitter account ujphoto. I’m currently using a Nikon D3000 and a Pentax Q-S1.