Remember: you’re a software engineer working on a webapp in 2016. Yesterday, during sprint planning, you were assigned a list of tickets for the two-week sprint. Your MapReduce script is running, so you have some time to browse Hacker News. You read about yet another promising web framework that your frontend teammate might want to pitch to your CTO in a year or two. Meanwhile, you’ve been telling yourself it’s time to learn Spark. You want to become the data engineer every company will want on its team in two or three years, when you quit your job. You know time will go fast.

My great-great-grandfather thought he’d be replaced by technology too.

He was a farrier in Mandres-en-Barrois, the small village in rural France where I grew up. Shoeing horses, repairing farmers’ carts. Then he saw a car drive through the next town over, or read an article about it in the paper. I can’t tell what exactly happened in his mind at that moment, but soon after, he became a mechanic, like every man in the family after him.

It is relatively simple to define values for a company, but translating them into concrete behaviors in everyday situations is a much more complex task. Often, this is because these values remain too abstract, too theoretical. As a result, we expect overly predictable behaviors, as if our biases or lack of imagination prevent us from seeing things differently. These examples are sometimes too general, sometimes too specific.

In a world where timelines and task lists rule project management, we often forget a crucial aspect of planning—risk assessment.

At the edge of the French internet, at the address http://www.kraland.org, there is a website whose design hasn’t changed very much in twenty years.

J’éprouve depuis un certain temps un interêt pour la période allant de la fin des années 60 au début des années 70 en France, qu’on pourrait approximativement ramener à 1965-1975. On pourrait la désigner comme la fin des Trente Glorieuses ou comme les années post-mai 68, mais sa valeur historique n’a guère d’importance pour moi. Je l’apprécie d’abord à travers ses films, ses chansons, et surtout ses vestiges.

Dans ce livre paru récemment aux éditions Pix’n Love, Alexis Blanchet et Guillaume Montagnon s’attardent sur l’histoire du jeu vidéo en France, des années 60, lorsque le jeu vidéo n’était qu’un vague prétexte à des recherches sur l’IA en laboratoire, jusqu’au début des années 90, à l’aube de sa maturité.

I spent years on looking for a powerful and accurate recommendations system that would give me the titles of the movies I was desperately needing to bring my film knowledge to completeness (we movie buffs are quite obsessional - and we try to heal ourselves with making lists). The more I discovered new movies and new directors, the more the recommendations engine I was using were proved ineffective.