To 2022 and beyond

2022-01-08 Last modified on 2022-01-08

Hello, is it me you're looking for? I hope you are doing well.

Work

I joined the CyberPeace Institute at the end of 2020 and I am learning a lot since I joined! I am part of a team with various expertises (cybercrime investigators, digital forensics experts etc.) which is quite fascinating. I think that officially we say that we "develop an innovative analytical framework and forensics capabilities".

I have been involved in multiple subjects, for example:

  • Helped with the tools selection for the framework.
  • Worked on Cyber Incident Tracer #HEALTH and super happy with my dev buddy who took care of the charts part of the website!
  • Set up CI/CD with GitLab Pipelines (I spent weeks on that).
  • Contributed to Helm packages for 3rd party apps (for example MISP, OpenCTI).
  • Development of a few internal apps.

And helped other teams:

  • Helped a lot with the website (yes, WordPress!): digged many performance issues, did a lot of cleaning.
  • Played a lot with Jira to create boards.
  • Created some scraping script to pull some data.

On the dev side:

  • For our APIs, we use Go. It is the language at the intersection of multiple persons, I may explore other languages secretly in 2022.
  • For our web applications, we are focusing on React and I use Svelte / SvelteKit for my mini-projects.
  • We use multiple storage for our data, particularly ArangoDB which is nice until you try to connect something to it, oh wait you can't because no jdbc.
  • We are on GCP, and I am quite happy because we will try a smaller provider (ExoScale).

And I survived Kubernetes! Many thanks to some old friends (Papy, Prune, Vincent, Kaneda) for their precious help!

Not work

I killed some projects and secretly retarted one of them. Still playing with Crystal and enjoying my first steps with Nim.

For the web, I am still in love with Svelte and SvelteKit, and curious about Solid and Astro. The JavaScript landscape is quite exciting and I hope for a replacement of the classic trio Angular / React / Vue. Anyway, everybody relies on jQuery in the real world...

About this website:

  • Moved to SvelteKit + Contentful after killing beulogue.
  • I started a Museum of Poorly Photographed Art to remove the dust from pictures I take when I visit museums. I will add more content in 2022.
  • I added a "badidon" section (in French) on my website with something stupid. I'll try to find the courage and time to explore more and add content to this section.
  • It seems that the "News from last month" posts are read by other persons than me (or you are a lot in my head), I will continue that. Maybe try to finally automate it a little bit (the workflow has already been improved).

I have my domains on AWS since years because I was using up to deploy everything. Up is an amazing tool but I switched to Vercel for my deployments. I can now move my domains out of AWS (to Gandi).

Last year I also set up Bitwarden for my wife and I. I also tried 1Password (because of Masked Email with Fastmail) but I prefer Bitwarden. I will write about masked email in a future article.

As usual I did some amazing contribution to open source projects:

Cycling

Lazy year was lazy !

Strava says I did 1267kms; a lot less than last year, but I did some nice rides:

Cycling at the Col de la Givrine

Cooking

I continued cooking for a few months, I made some breads and I have never felt so French! I had to stop for a few months for personal reasons but now I can get back into it. Yeah!

Some bread

I also upgraded my cookies level and I am getting close to what I want: some sablés which are cooked but not brown. Still a few tests to do :).

Travelling

We were able to go to France to see the family a few times.

We also went to Fribourg in July:

Fribourg

And Thun / Bern in September:

Thun

We also went to the Musée Rath, part of the Musée d'Art et d'Histoire de Genève for a tête à tête with some art pieces, it was amazing:

La Toilette d’Atalante from James Pradier at the Musée Rath (Genève)

Various

I started doing some crochet to make a beanie for the baby (this is the moment when you say "whaaaat" and yes, we have a daughter now). I have been quite lazy at the end of the year. I have to finish a cardigan for my wife.

I also bought a nice ukulele but I don't have much time to practice.

Entertainment

Music

I tried to do some music review in the French part of my website, but it takes more time than I thought. I'd like to try again in 2022.

Some nice albums for your ears:

And we have been listening to a lot of classical music.

Videos

Movies I liked:

TV shows I liked:

Books

Still spending to much time reading stuff on the Internet... But here are some books I finished last year:

And I am in the middle of La Horde du Contrevent (in French).

In 2022 I want to read Warez: The Infrastructure and Aesthetics of Piracy.

Games

  • WHAT THE GOLF? is great! Innovative and fun, and WTF.
  • Cozy Grove - come for the view, stay for the friends: cute but a bit boring. The objects to find are often too small (played on my phone) and cooking requires rare items which is quite frustrating.
  • #DRIVE - An Endless Driving Video Game, it is nice!
  • A lot of Good Sudoku
  • Started CyberPunk 2077, it is not as fun as I expected. Some things are too complex for nothing (braindance, body mods, hacking...), other elements make the game a bit boring (capabilities when upgrading levels, driving which feels a bit clunky, dialogs are so slow I spent more time sitting and talking to NPCs than actually doing things). I almost stopped but got hooked when Keanu Reeves arrives in the game.
  • Started Watch Dogs 2: I really enjoyed the first one, and I like the start of this one!

Happy new year!

Happy New Year to all those who will have a good year. Good luck and hang in there for the others, 2023 will be there promptly.

If you are still reading, know that I love you very much. Let's end this with a lovely song: black midi - John L - YouTube