Hello World, v2.0

(This article was previously posted on my personal blog on January 22, 2019. Since this blog no longer exists, I decided to republish it here.)

My backlog of project ideas is long. Like, ridiculously long. Even though I clean it out every few weeks, I see problems and features everywhere. Being an ambitious, global-project-loving solver, I?have?the?urge?to work on every one of them, whether designing or developing them.?

This urge is part of me.

As far as I remember, I have always been an entrepreneur with many ideas. At school, when I was around 16, I started a printed newspaper and a musical radio before joining the theatre club. I mostly acted as a technical manager and, later, a tour organiser. I did it for three years until I graduated and moved to Brussels. At the same time, I played music at the music school and was part of an international boys' choir with whom I travelled a lot.?

Once in Brussels, I started to study music at the Royal Conservatoire of Music. I didn't know what direction to take between the music (I had been playing the saxophone and the clarinet for more than 10 years already) or the computer sciences (I received my first computer when I was 6 - a Commodore Schneider 464 - and I never really played with it, I was more like "let's copy this code from this book - it was a huge tendance at this time -, then let's update it and see what happens..."). They were both attractive, but I don't know; something needed to be added. So, I chose to take the entrance exams, and since I passed them, I started studying music. But because I needed to pay my rent and so on, at the same time, I also began to work for Apple Belux as a demo-boy first (it was just when they released their new coloured MacBooks and iMacs, their first iPod,...) and very quickly, I moved to one of their resellers as one of their technical guys, and then to another reseller as "the" technical guy. It was a big challenge (or opportunity?) to manage customers' networks and IT stuff while the Internet was only (slowly) arriving...

And this Internet opened so many new ways... If you are in the mid90s or later, you can't understand what I mean, but the Internet was a?big?change. I started to develop static websites, but very quickly, the idea of having a database behind came, and you know, when this kind of idea arrives... So, I learned MySQL and PHP first but also Apache, IPTables, and Bind for me to deploy and manage these websites (yes, in the plural and yes, I could have used an online hosting service... but where's the fun then, right?)

I will?always remember?the day I turned freelance. It was on a whim, without thinking about the consequences. Still, again, I was lucky because I met some other guys, and they guided me to my first customers, and we had some projects together. At this time, I also was a motorcycle biker. I was biking on circuits and even ran several courses, eventually winning some points in the Belgian Motorbike Championship. The problem was that it wasn't easy to find all the information about the championships and the training days, so I built a website to implement a news engine, a forum, a gallery, a "training blog", and so on. It was secured with a login, and I developed everything from scratch. I learned so much by doing this, and yes, again, I could have implemented some external modules, but learning all of this was so... exciting. If I want to be honest here, I should add "but also very time-consuming...". This time also meant a switch for me. I stopped my musical studies to be fully involved in IT. Even though I taught music and orchestrated a bit, I quickly became an exclusive "Multimedia Consultant", as I liked to call myself, listening to my customers and my desires for my website and trying to solve their (my?) problems...

This website was my first little success, and I'm proud of it. It was not about money (and by the way, I lost a lot of money in it); it was just about sharing knowledge to make our pilot's life easier. After only a few months, more than 1500 people were already subscribed (only Belgians and French speakers biking on circuits, that's a lot ^^), so I created my first company. OK, it was a non-profit organisation, but still... I had to enrol people with me (for the administrative parts, you know...), and we started organising our training days and, later on, even our courses. By doing so, we entered the marketing world by doing some ads and sponsorships. We also applied for a reporter card that allowed us to do some reportages in the paddocks of world championships. Always new ideas to power up this little project...

Then happened what was to happen, I had to stop biking for medical reasons. And when you love to do something you were used to doing before, and when a big part of your life is related to this, it becomes complicated. I couldn't go to the circuits anymore without being frustrated, so my appetite wasn't there anymore. But then (hazards of life), I was introduced to a musicologist who annotated all the prominent musical artists (and their songs) and created an extensive network of influences between them. He has been working on it for years already, and now, he wants to put all of this on the Internet... including the databases, the servers, and so on...?

For over 10 years, I have been constantly working on this big project—one you may only have once in your life. I am fortunate because this project encompasses my two first passions: music and technology. It hasn't always been easy, and I learned a lot about pugnacity, patience, and sacrifice, but it has always been so rewarding in terms of knowledge.?

All of this gave me and continues to give me a lot of ideas, problems, and headaches you can't even imagine. And I grew up solving all of them, one after the other. I started alone by doing Basic on a Commodore, and I am now the CTO of a team orchestrating an AI-based project.

I have an irrational fear of missing out.

I have failed several times in my life. I also filed for bankruptcy, and it took me years to fix my finances. I don't know if someone who has never had that kind of problem can even imagine the consequences of being personally bankrupt, all the sacrifices it means. But it also gives me a precise, valuable goal to reach even though it brings a lot of questions, like, how could I have prevented it? What should I have done differently? Was I the right guy?

I am also a self-educated guy. I didn't study computer science but music and direction. Of course, I read a lot, watched many conferences or tutorials, tried many things, and dived deep into many forums. I got the knowledge, but it was just about what I needed at least once. I only know about what I could have read before, but my problem is that I need to learn about another better option that could always exist.

Nothing will ever be perfect. No matter the decision, the important thing is to have one. I don't remember where it comes from, but this is true. If you don't want to miss things, you have to miss things.

How I stopped worrying and learned to trust.

As former Apple CEO Steve Jobs famously said, "It doesn't make sense to hire smart people and tell them what to do; we hire smart people so they can tell us what to do."

Well... he's right! So, I came across the idea of sharing my ideas instead of giving technical instructions... or at least not too much, just what it needs. Not only do I take it off my head, but I also free myself time to think about something else or to focus on something else that I would be in charge of.?

This is challenging. Especially when you founded the project because it is customary to do everything at the very beginning, and it becomes a habit very quickly. But at some point, you have to delegate. Delegate and trust. Trust means you have to be sure the process/syntax/... is the one you expect, especially when you build a vast infrastructure based on micro-services, as we do. Orchestration is only possible with the proper implementation. But rechecking the code is not an option here, so you have to trust people.?

Trust doesn't come alone, obviously. You need oral alignments, written decisions and a string normalisation. You also need to define a manager, the person responsible for this part (could be a service, an entire project, a dataset, a communication...), and once this is designed, you have to follow them and their instructions (if any). It could be a developer who received instructions to build a new service, knowing the expected input/output and the several operations to perform; another one who builds creative content; another one who has to prepare a?special?dataset; or another one who will coordinate the project. Everybody has a role and more or less responsibilities, and we have to trust them.

Let's start with little things if you don't feel it and with only a few people. As soon as you see you can trust them and get the result you expected, you will stop worrying and start having a clearer mind.