Celebrating my 100th article!

For this special edition, I'm not going to play by the usual script, I won’t hand-pick a selection of ??recommended?? articles. This would be too boring!

Many of my newsletter's subscribers don't know me in person, and the number of subscribers almost doubled over the past year and a half, so why not share a little bit of information about myself?

LinkedIn is not Facebook, so I will stay purely professional...

1. You might have noticed that I rarely speak at events. I find it a duty to speak on stage to share ideas with panelists and to transmit knowledge (especially to students), so I won't stop participating, but it always goes against my personality which I would summarize simply as INTP (in MBTI terms).
2. I have no issues with time management. I skip meetings which I consider useless not only for me, but for all parties. As for the meetings which I can't really avoid, I use them for tech watch / reading research papers unless someone interrupts me with a question or the meeting is REALLY THAT important
3. I have one single Arch-enemy, and it is called Microsoft Teams. I don't use Teams if I can. If people want to reach me, they are kindly advised to drop an e-mail. I know this is a lost war…
4. I have a bunch of best friends: my productivity tools. vi for text, python for dev, freeFrom / excaliDraw / proCreate for making images
5. I am a huge fan of Nassim Nicholas Taleb. His tinkering approach to science deeply resonates with my philosophy of work
6. I believe that ??Talent?? is not the thing HR wants us to eat for breakfast, lunch and dinner. For me, Talent means being gifted with an unfair advantage. The first thing graduate people should do is to seek this advantage into their self and start exploiting it for the best of the "society". Whether they like it or not it will pay off: the return on investment will be huge on the medium term
7. I have an unfair advantage, and it is what I've learnt by reading: I've been reading 1 or 2 hours of research papers / scientific magazines / engineering & theoretical books for a steady 35 years
8. My unfair advantage started to power up with the emergence of AIDS. It sparkled my interest for genetics and biology. It was soon followed by superconductivity, numbers theory, archaeology, linguistics, and so forth. This although I have a bad memory.
9. My unfair advantage reached full regime when I started to bridge gaps between my own engineering problems with what I learnt from unrelated disciplines. I spent much more time procrastinating but my productivity soared exponentially
10. Like so many authors, I believe that writing on social networks brings plenty of benefits. (a) You cannot pretend or fake when you share your thoughts publicly. (b) The prospect of being read by your peers makes you very demanding on yourself. (c) You gain invaluable feedback from some the most knowledgeable people around the world

I think it's about it. Hope I entertained you. More to come in... the 200th edition!

If this memo helped you, shocked you, deterred you, resonated in any useful or distasteful way... Or if you want to share your own experience: fell free to react in comments :)