I woke up this morning feeling the need to take stock of my progress in life. I don't know if "to take stock" is as conversational as "faire le point" in French, but you get the idea: I want to know where I am, set destinations and share lessons learned. I will write daily to pursue that goal for thirty days, hopefully building a solid writing habit and making a friend or two along the way. As the subtitle suggests, I will talk seriously about tech, sometimes lightly about life, sometimes contemplatively about products & entrepreneurship, and constantly explore love in its most general form, from our intrinsic desire to learn to our natural instinct of reproduction. This generalist approach to content is probably the worst way to build an audience, but I write to discover who I am, so I cannot predict the outcome. I secretly hope that some insights will be helpful to others. You can rely on post tags to avoid nerd traps. That said, I recognize the reader's probably wondering who I am, so let me use this opening post to introduce myself. I hope starting this way doesn't sound too narcissistic: I want to make this series as authentic as possible to give the readers some personal substance to identify with. The incoming posts will be less self-centered, I promise. 

"I was a terror since the public school era," - even earlier, actually. I was born in Paris on the 8th of September 1997 in a blended family. I share my dad with two older brothers and my mum with an older sister. My parents were a classic case of love at first sight, or coup de foudre. They met at the law firm they both worked at less than a year before my birth. I spent the first months of my life in hospital because of renal complications. Doctors said I would have died if I wasn't a five-kilogram newborn. Already too big to fail. I, of course, do not remember these early days, but most will agree that early traumatic separation from parents can leave indelible scars.

School has always been complicated for the little me, who constantly rejected authority and control. I instinctively saw it as a disciplinary institution—a mandatory children's ranking machine. Despite being a curious soul, this vision hindered my learning ability, leading to getting kicked out for the first time at fourteen for behavioral issues and poor academic results. A psychiatrist diagnosed me with ADHD and prescribed me Ritalin. My parents sent me to a tennis academy boarding school. Exercise was a straightforward solution to calm a kid who could not sit still for more than half an hour. It worked well, and over time things improved, though it's difficult to discern whether the drugs or the sports played the more significant role in my progress. I'll let the reader decide. In four years of residential school, I was lonely enough to discover a love for literature that has stayed with me ever since. I read classic authors like Kafka, Stendhal, and Dostoïevski, to name a few. While tennis may have been the initial remedy for my inability to sit still, I found true peace and fulfillment in literature.

At seventeen, I got hooked on mathematics after attending a vulgarization conference on the Riemann hypothesis (sorry for the French ref), probably the biggest unsolved problem in math. At that age, I wasn't confident enough to target prestigious engineering schools that develop the pretentious personalities I encountered later in my professional life. I went to Epitech, a software-focused school, following the advice of a math teacher I randomly met in an internet cafe. At that time, playing MMORPG was considered a rebellious, addictive behavior to escape from reality, at least in my family. I had to frequent these places to evade parental control. Learning to code gave me everything, from intellectual reward to autonomy. But man, it was hard. I remember struggling with pointers and memory the first year or two. I wasn't exceptionally gifted, but I tried so hard that I eventually reached the top 10%. I used to love writing C code for programs on Unix systems. Any serious low-level programmer would laugh at this code, as I do today, but the first achievements often occupy a special place in one’s heart. To be serious about software, you must start with low-level languages. I even got my hands dirty with the X86 assembly, rewriting the C library functions like strcpy and friends. The last two years of the Epitech education progressively turned into business bullshit. I spent my days playing chess, convinced that nothing is more useful than useless knowledge. I decided I had enough technical background to start my professional life. So I dropped out six months before the graduating ceremony and went for it.

I will spare you a linear narration of my successive jobs and entrepreneurial stories. Some are worth an entire post, and I must keep the material for the next twenty-nine days of writing. However, my drive has always been two-fold: to be free and to make something people want. The corporate world can be crushing for the soul. Most will trade their inner kid for status and a perception of success. There is a reason this Trainspotting quote resonates so hard with every 90's kid after a bad office day of doing submissive and redundant tasks. The act of creation is the only escape. It requires bravery, passion, and love.

In the last three years, I have fallen in love with crypto because it aligns with my libertarian values. Crypto is a rebel, escaping the disciplinary institutions. Crypto is open and transparent. Crypto is for everyone. Crypto is untamable. I hope this series of articles will attract readers in the decentralized world. I also hope to have the discipline to keep writing daily, and if I do, it will be unchained. onchain.

Welcome onboard.