Skills on NotNil Blog

A parrot, ChatGPT, and French panache

Thu, 23 Feb 2023 00:00:00 +0000

A minister and a parrot

The paper of record, 20 February 2023

I don’t know if you saw it go by, but I recommend reading this article published online in Le Monde.

The minister interviewed is Jean-Noël Barrot, minister delegate for digital affairs in the current government, and the interview is about the minister’s comments on ChatGPT.

Before you read what follows, I want to be clear that I don’t have the verbatim of the interview. There is a non-negligible chance the remarks were distorted (the rare times I’ve dealt with a journalist, half the transcriptions meant the opposite of what I’d said). Still, watching this interview with the minister, that chance gets smaller.

Cloud and skills, part 2

Sun, 04 Dec 2022 00:00:00 +0000

The France that wins

This article follows on from a previous one, in which I talked about building individual skills, taking as an example a developer who deploys an application on PaaS rather than deploying it on a server, at least once. In this post, I mean to let that line of thought drift toward how skills get built at the scale of our country.

Watch out, this is going to go far!

Cloud and skills, part 1

Sun, 06 Nov 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Prelude

What follows is the start of a broader reflection on how computing skills are managed in the age of cloud-everything, whether individual or collective, at the scale of a company, or even of a country.

The famous “side project”

In recruiting I meet about one junior dev a week, from every kind of background: engineering school, DUT/BUT, short program, bootcamp, or even self-taught.

On this kind of profile, we are obviously interested in the projects the candidate has built, and all the more in the ones built on their own time, which very often give a better read on the candidate, their skills, their expectations, and what drives them.