☝🏻 Thought of the day: collaborative software or services enabling better collaboration within a team is overrated or overestimated. If you are a loner at work, you’ll stay a loner, with or without a collab suite. 🤷🏻‍♂️

I use Notion quite a lot at work to help me manage my workloads and projects. It’s quite a powerful and flexible tool, rarely seen these days. I appreciate every minute I spend in it, to the same level I experience when using Apple Keynote.

I’m still surprised and baffled when I see coworkers with so limited knowledge of Microsoft Word and Microsoft Excel. I mean, beyond typing words and writing simple calculations. 🤔

Sometimes, writing is like swimming against the current. Today, ideas were fuzzy, and I could not clarify them and put them in the right order. Those days are never easy, especially when it’s a day where writing intelligent texts is absolutely essential. People are depending on me. That was a bad day. Sign-off. 😑

Om Malik link-posting on his blog:

David Mills, the creator of Network Time Protocol (NTP), which is fundamental to the functioning of networks. Mills, nicknamed the Internet’s Time Lord by his peers, passed away on January 17 at the age of 85. His contributions to the development and evolution of the Internet are numerous and far-reaching. We are quietly losing a generation that has helped build the network we often take for granted. Source: RIP, Internet’s Time Lord – On my Om

I do deal with NTP protocol from time to time at my job as a solution architect. The fathers (and mothers) of the modern computing era are dying.

The notion of “avoiding vendors lock-in” in information technology is interesting. I would argue that it’s impossible to completely be without some sort of vendor lock-in1. At some point, there is always a required commitment level. You commit to open-source software. You commit to … read more

Confession of the day: I hate being confined to the world of Microsoft 365 for my work, knowing that there are much cooler tools out there. Notion is one example, Basecamp is another one, Monday, etc, even though it might be a controversial opinion. And don’t get me started about the Microsoft Visio; there are dozens of much better alternatives¹.

I’m spending my Friday afternoon writing documents for a big project at work. Even at work, I write a lot, which is a creative process, but in a different context. My personal hobbies nourish my creativity at work. Or the other way around. I don’t know. I like my job. My hobbies. My creative life. 😌

This morning, at work, I had the idea of creating a GPT that would act as a virtual resume for me. Colleagues would prompt this GPT about my professional journey with usual questions about my past experience, projects, certifications, abilities, etc. I uploaded a few files, including my resume and some other professional stuff, to try it out. It took me 15 minutes to create this virtual representation of myself. Tested many prompts against it. I’m blown away. The future is here, ladies and gentlemen.

Google announcement regarding egress fees:

Starting today, Google Cloud customers who wish to stop using Google Cloud and migrate their data to another cloud provider and/or on premises, can take advantage of free network data transfer to migrate their data out of Google Cloud. This applies to all customers globally. Source: Eliminating data transfer fees when migrating off Google Cloud | Google Cloud Blog

This is major. I often see clients forget to consider the exit costs of any hyper-scaler in the TCO calculation. Getting into the cloud isn’t cheap. And up until today, getting out of the cloud wasn’t either. Now, for those on GCP, it is. I expect the others (looking at you, AWS, and Azure) to follow, maybe not this year, but they will, either by their choice or they will be forced. This is an anti-competitive measure to charge for egress fees.

Someone at work sent me a text to get feedback. After reading it, I had this vague impression that ChatGPT was involved in the process. Out of curiosity, I openly asked the author if it was the case. And sure enough, the answer was yes. 8 out of 10 times, the outcome is the same when I ask that question. Gen AI usage is becoming pervasive in my world at work. Is it the same for you?

Scrolling through my LinkedIn timeline today. It always gives me weird feelings when I see people I work with announcing their retirement. These posts are reminders that, eventually, everyone will cross that gate. Me included. 😔

Monday. A new work week begins. To celebrate, I created a new category for my work-related posts (RSS feed). I plan to share more about my work life in 2024 and beyond. 👨🏻‍💻

Introspection time: I chose to be in IT because I thought it was much easier to deal with computers than humans. I’m not an introvert, though, far from it. But, it happened without explicit thought back in the day. After 30 years in IT, I still think the same, and I often say that the challenge in the information technology field is not about technology per se, but it’s mostly about human issues with technology. Ironically, most of my job today is to build teams of people to make things happen. I’m still focused on technology, but in reality, I try to ensure that all members of a team work towards the same objectives. I’m pretty good about it and people are appreciative of my work. How ironic.

Going back to work tomorrow after a two-week break that was much needed. Now, I know what’s awaiting me tomorrow. It’s a fuckin busy agenda. 😳 I refrained all weekend from connecting to my office email. Sure, I could have done a pre-cleanup and say: ok, it’s not that bad. But I didn’t do it. Why? Because my mailbox would have been cleaner, yeah, but not my mental charge, would have been 🤯. It was a good decision to stay partly innocent. ☝🏻