TL;DR: I’m building a new prototype of a social media product. It’s called Echochamber.ai and I’m documenting the process. After a 9 months hiatus, I finally rebooted my project last December. I finished my previous contract and decided to commit to it 3 months full time focusing on finalizing a prototype and validating my hypothesis: Users would be interested in receiving weekly links digest from a different perspective on topics of their interest.

TL;DR: I’m building a new prototype of a social media product. It’s called Echochamber.ai and I’m documenting the process. I left you in mid-March with the first prototype of my Echochamber.ai idea, which was, at best funny, at worst stupid. However, the feedback about the idea was significantly positive. I would regularly pitch the idea, and people would grasp it instantly (or be completely insensible, but that’s fine 🙂) While I felt it was too early to continue focusing full-time on the idea, I took a full-time contract to get some cash while working on the next iteration on the side.

TL;DR: I’m building a new prototype of a social media product. It’s called Echochamber.ai. I’ve started to document the process here. From the about page: Echochamber.ai is an anti-echo-chamber tool. First, we identify your topics of interest based on your Twitter profile and the accounts you follow. Then, we will send you a daily digest of 5 news based on relevant issues for you outside of your social media bubble.

While having a bit of free time between 2 contracts last january, I decided to build a website for my own, the first time in 10 years. (it’s a nerdy data visualisation about NBA data - if you follow this blog, you know I love basketball). Later in the year, I built another experiment website to track the things I’m not learning on Wikipedia everyday :-)). The 2 links are here:

I’m learning to use Jenkins. If you’re reading this, it means my 1st build worked. Here is my inspiration, with a complete tutorial.

We have one ritual in my new job. Every other Friday afternoon, one of us has to present a non-work related topic of its interest (usually 10-15 minutes). There is no limitation for that and we can cover whatever we want. The only detail is we usually bring a couple of nerf guns so things can get crazy in one way of the other. Anyway, it’s really good fun. I recycled an old presentation for my first round so no big surprises there (it’s also a subject I covered so many times in my previous jobs).

2018 is starting with as much changes as 2017 (well at least the blog is not moving host, I’m still happy with AWS). Lots of moving pieces on the personal and professional side too (as expected, my Chromebook is now taking the dust :-)). I’m now head of engineering for a startup, working at the intersection of artificial intelligence and health technologies. We are building deep learning applications for skin cancer research and I’m in charge of all our end-user apps.

Being in-between jobs, I needed a cheap laptop to be able to work outside of my flat in my favorite South London cafes. I could have got a nice Macbook or the Ubuntu certified Dell XPS13 (or even a Thinkpad) but these tiny machines don’t come cheap and there is a strong change that I would get a work laptop with my next job matching the same specs. So I’d rarther save a grand for a personal laptop that could get the dust in a couple of weeks.

The only constant in life is Change, and 2017 is currently confirming this rule for me. More to come soon but as for now the main change here is the hosting for this blog which is now living in the cloud (or more specifically on AWS).

Earlier this year, I’ve been asked to explain how end-to-end encryption is working for a non-technical audience (think of computer litterate people who do not know that much of geek stuff outside or their MSOffice package). The only constrain was time (10 minutes maximum). That was very interesting experience and brought great prompt for more discussions. I thought the presentation support could be of interest for someone else. Here is it, on Slideshare.