Linguist by talent, code monkey by choice, corporate drone by obligation. sungnyemun. Kongduino.
I am a Jack of All Trades, of sorts. Been around the block a few times, and my résumé looks like a random collection of experiences lifted from various legit résumés… But there are a couple of constants. I have been writing code, good or bad, for 40+ years, and, surprising for a French guy, I speak a few languages – and want so badly to learn a few more.
Linguist by talent, code monkey by choice, corporate drone by obligation used to be my motto for a long while. The corporate drone part, not so much these days…
I have spent most of my adult life in Asia, a large part of my career in sales and sales management, a big chunk of which in the wine & spirits business. 20 years ago, when I transitioned from management to wine, I financed that career move by writing code for clients, mostly SMEs, from California to Australia. Meanwhile, I was learning about wine, and started trading, leveraging my knowledge of Asia against my ignorance of the wine biz.
My code was/is mostly utilitarian code: think Soviet sense of design. It works, doesn’t break (often), but is plain-looking at best, ugly at worst. I. Don’t. Do. Design. I do speed and efficiency, though. Speed both in terms of execution speed, and development speed.
Then came IoT. While working in the wines & spirits business, one thing that hit me was the lack of tech in that industry. We’re talking sales people attending exhibitions with a stack of business cards, a paper pad, and a stapler. When they meet a new prospect, they exchange business cards, staple it to a new page, and jot down notes… And if they can read these notes, after the show, they might do a follow-up. Meanwhile, I was using an app developed by a friend of mine, which read business cards, created contacts from them, sent first follow-up emails, and produced Excel files… They were impressed, but always said “We’ll do it the traditional way this year…”
And this reached everywhere in the industry. Even computers are not that popular yet with a part of this crowd. Unread emails in the thousands are common – and I am not talking spam. Too many emails! I can’t read all that! (While complaining the overseas clients never answered theirs…) And on the production side it’s very much so the same – they might invest in the newest press, and combine harvester, but tech is still mostly absent: monitoring the fields, the cellars, the production facilities, all this is done by humans, at least in France (some countries like Spain are doing much better on this). I remember a winery where the manager in charge of the vineyards, monitoring the crops year-round, was retiring. He had been working in the same place 50 years, and all his knowledge was in his brain, and nowhere else. He could tell you without looking at the fruits which row was planted with with grape. Which area needed more irrigation, or less. And so on…
Same thing for transportation: once the products leave the winery, you have no idea where are, how well they are stored (especially important for fine wines!), how long they’ve been sitting in the sun in the harbour, etc… This part had all my attention, and I started working on a product to monitor the wines during transportation. Which led to LoRa – how could we send the data collected by the device during transportation automatically, without human intervention…?
This, plus Covid, brought me across to the IoT industry. I am now a full-time dev, either writing code for new and older devices, or breaking new devices and other devs’ code (they call it beta-testing I believe!). I have helped here and there with documentation too – a weakness in many companies, and especially in China – bringing in the point of view of a user, rather than a dev with his nose buried in code, or an engineer with his nose in schematics. But, everybody knows this! is not an acceptable answer when pointing out gaps in the docs. You say Oh right! and add the relevant pieces. This message has been hard to get across, but it’s starting to take…