This article is a mix of personal stories, social & interpersonal psychology, and technology (with some drive-by remarks about Free & Open Source software). I originally drafted this article in the fall of 2021 and winter of 2022, but I needed more time to rewrite it a fourth time (because why not). So, while this post ends up landing straight into the twilight zone “between xmas and New Year”, it has more insights and illustrations and arguably makes for a better-rounded story, even if it’s a 7 to 9 minutes read rather than 5-6.
Continue reading “The post-lockdown work rave, abuse, and shortened fuses”Year MMXXI in 8 minutes
Near the end of 2020, I put a lot of thought into reevaluating my business’ value proposition, strategy, and processes. It’s a good thing I did that back then, because 2021 was quite different from 2020; I had much less time to “deepthink”, and I spent a majority of 2021 on an intense work treadmill, which led to me micro-burning out three times in the process. Also, guilt about feeling like I’m not contributing to open-source enough.
Continue reading “Year MMXXI in 8 minutes”How long does it take to create a website? (and why your FLOSS project doesn’t need one)
The 2019–2020 period was a long R&D cycle for me, with a whole herd of yaks to shave, however it did give me new tools and abilities, such as the capacity to rapidly develop modern-looking websites without hand-coding them nor spending hours fruitlessly searching for—and being disappointed by—”suitable” themes.
Continue reading “How long does it take to create a website? (and why your FLOSS project doesn’t need one)”Year MMXX summarized in 7 minutes
For some reason, I didn’t get to see much people, and didn’t have much client work revenue throughout that year. I’m not sure why 🤔
Continue reading “Year MMXX summarized in 7 minutes”New photography portfolio
Side note: I originally planned to publish part III of my “upgrade treadmill trilogy” on January 31st, 2022, but something unexpected came up in recent days, which might make me rewrite the majority of that blog post for the 3rd time, so… holding pattern for now. It’ll probably happen later in February-March. In the meantime, here’s some unrelated quick announcement I wanted to share for quite a while.
Continue reading “New photography portfolio”CMSes & static site generators: why I (still) chose WordPress for my business websites
For many years, until 2021, the idéemarque* website was my own static HTML hand-written codebase, which had the advantage of performance and flexibility (vs “what a theme dictates”), but was also impossible to scale, because it had a bus factor of 1 and a pain level over 9000. I even had it version-controlled in Git all the way back to 2014 (back when I finally joined the Git masochists sect). I was the only person in the world who could maintain it or contribute to it, because, quite frankly, you need to reach geek level 30+ to enter that dungeon, while most people, including new generations, don’t know how to use computers.
Continue reading “CMSes & static site generators: why I (still) chose WordPress for my business websites”Introducing Regento, marketing for FLOSS-centric companies and transitioning industries
In this blog post, I’m taking a quick break from my GTG blogging frenzy to talk about another one of my non-software projects from the past few months years (estimated reading time: 3 ½ minutes).
Introducing Atypica
A while ago, I envisioned building a new* professional video production collective for commercial and non-commercial projects, both as a “creative outlet” for one of my long-standing passions, and as a way to build a specialized service offering that can act as a bridge between my own Montreal-based marketing agency and other collaborators or artists and freelancers.
Continue reading “Introducing Atypica”Reviewing the Librem 15
Following up on my previous post where I detailed the work I’ve been doing mostly on Purism’s website, today’s post post will cover some video work. Near the beginning of October, I received a Librem 15 v2 unit for testing and reviewing purposes. I have been using it as my main laptop since then, as I don’t believe in reviewing something without using it daily for a couple weeks at least. And so on nights and week-ends, I wrote down testing results, rough impressions and recommendations, then wrote a detailed plan and script to make the first in depth video review of this laptop. Here’s the result—not your typical 2-minutes superficial tour:
With this review, I wanted to:
- Satisfy my own curiosity and then share the key findings; one of the things that annoyed me some months ago is that I couldn’t find any good “up close” review video to answer my own technical questions, and I thought “Surely I’m not the only one! Certainly a bunch of other people would like to see what the beast feels like in practice.”
- Make an audio+video production I would be proud of, artistically speaking. I’m rather meticulous in my craft as like creating quality work made to last (similarly, I have recently finished a particular decorative painting after months of obsession… I’ll let you know about that in some other blog post 😉
- Put my production equipment to good use; I had recently purchased a lot of equipment for my studio and outdoors shooting—it was just begging to be used! Some details on that further down in this post.
- Provide a ton of industrial design feedback to the Purism team for future models, based on my experience owning and using almost every laptop type out there. And so I did. Pages and pages of it, way more than can fit in a video:
Helping Purism structure its messaging
I meant to finish writing and posting this a month or two ago, but urgent tasks and life kept getting in the way. I don’t often talk about client work here, but since this is public-facing ongoing work for a company that is insanely pro-Free-Software (not just “open source”), a company that ships GNOME3 by default on their laptops (something I have awaited for years), I guess it makes sense to talk about what I’ve been up to recently.
So, for a few weeks three months now, I have been helping Purism structure its messaging and get its business in a better shape. Purism is, in itself, a hugely interesting endeavour. Heck, I could go out on a limb and say this venture, alongside the work Endless is doing, is quite possibly one of the most exciting things that has happened to the Free desktop for the past decade—and yet almost nobody heard of it.
Before I can even consider visual branding work (maybe someday—when I get to that point, that would mean things are going really well), there was a fundamental need to fill various gaps in the strategy and daily operations, and to address messaging in a way that simultaneously resonates with:
- hardcore Free Software enthusiasts;
- “Linux” (GNU/Linux) users and developers just looking for great ultraportable workhorses;
- the privacy/security-conscious crowd;
- the public at large (hopefully).