Did you ever feel overwhelmed by all these new techs popping up every other day?

At the beginning of my career, I was trying to learn everything: every new technology, framework, and tool. A lot of my free time was dedicated to this endless quest.

It was exhausting.

With more experience, I began to realize that I felt into a trap: the trend twister. The more I was learning, the more I was understanding that all these techs were built on the same first principles, the same foundations we build upon for decades.

Understanding the first principles of software development helped me to adapt to new techs quickly, to communicate effectively with my peers, and to increase my value as a developer.

That’s the end goal of The Valuable Dev: writing about timeless foundations and tools, for you to become a more valuable developer.

If you like my articles, let’s connect! You can subscribe to the monthly newsletter and reply to any email if you have questions, problems, or feedback. I’m always happy to help!

Any more question?

“That’s Nice, But… Who Are You?”

It’s where the bullet point craze begins:

• I’m a French developer living in Berlin.
• Coding is my hobby for 20 years. I’m coding for a living for 10+ years.
• I worked in many different companies: startups, middle sized businesses, and big corporations.
• I began as a “fullstack” web developer, and now I’m in the backend. I’ve also lead mentored and empowered developer teams.
• I actively study books and interesting articles, and not only about software development. I’m interested in many things.
• I believe that learning from different domains:
  • Brings value in our lives.
  • Gives us new and innovating ideas.
• My motto: “To quit this world a bit better than when I found it”. You may say I’m a dreamer, but I’m not the only one.

“Dear Sir, I want to know more!”

Holy cow! You want more bullet points? No? Well, don’t read the following, then.

The Definitive Timeline™ of the Author

• ~8 years old: Played weird video games (on tapes!) on a Thompson MO5. Already at that time I was trying to modify them.
• ~10 years old: Got my first video game console, the mythic NES. My dream was to create games.
• ~12 years old: My family got a new computer with Windows 3.1. Messed around with QBasic on MS-DOS to create my own versions of the games Gorillas and Nibbles. I already liked the terminal back then. All these attractive commands under my fingertips!
• 14 years old: Learned the basics of C to build a little text-based game, where you could be a dwarf with an axe. I know, nobody thought about that before. I’m such an innovator.
• 15 years old: Created a little RPG in C++ with DirectX, using Microsoft Paint to design very high quality assets (at least).
• 16 years old: Tried Linux (Mandrake). My soundcard wasn’t working (of course), and to try alternative drivers I had to recompile the whole kernel… good old times! After hours and hours of struggle, I accepted my defeat and moved back to Windows 98 and its blue screens of death.
• 17 years old: Created an almost-complete clone of Adventure of Lolo using Game Maker.
• 20 / 23 years old: Studied communication for 3 years. I loved it, it taught me a lot about soft skills.
• 23 years old: Learned Adobe Flash (oops), HTML, CSS, and PHP.
• 24 years old: Began to work as a “full stack” web developer (frontend and backend).
• 25 years old: “Specialization” as a PHP backend developer. No, PHP is not that bad.
• 29 years old: Team leader. Responsibilities shared with a friend.
• 30 years old: Began to write this blog.
• 31 years old: Team leader (again).
• 32 years old: Began to use Golang professionally.
• 33 years old: Began to learn Clojure.
• 34 years old: Self-published my first digital book, Building Your Mouseless Development Environment.
• 35 years old: Self-published the printed version of Building Your Mouseless Development Environment.

… to be continued (I hope!)

Daily Routine

I’m pretty sure nobody’s reading anymore, but just in case, let’s add more details. Here’s my daily routine; I follow it for years. It’s a general guideline I try to follow as much as I can.

Weekdays:

• Wake up around 5am 6am (getting old…).
• 20 minutes of stretching.
• 30 minutes of meditation.
• Writing, writing, and writing. It can be for a book, or for The Valuable Dev.
• Breakfast!
• Day job from 8am/9am till 5pm/6pm.
• After the day job, it’s side project time:
  • Write even more for The Valuable Dev.
  • Write for a book.
  • Create mouseless and open source CLIs.
  • Record videos for my Youtube channel.
  • … who knows?
• I like to sleep around 10pm.

Week end:

• I sometimes work on my side projects too.
• I try to do different stuff.

I’ve worked on these habits for years and it’s not over. I need to nurture them, if I want them to stick around.

I’m Currently Working On…

All my other projects are listed on my Github page. My biggest project right now is my book Learning To Play Vim.

“Why Are You Doing All of That?!”

I like it! That’s the main reason.

I also like helping if I can, and creating meaningful relationships with anybody interested to connect with me. Let’s learn from each other and improve!

Even if it’s trendy to only think about productivity, you don’t have to follow the herd. Be intentional with your life; do whatever you like.