In 1994, I started to have a professional paid activity which was related to my use of computers. Paris Meudon Observatory, Calvacom, IUFM de Paris, Angie, W3C, Pheromone, Opera Software, Mozilla is the list of places I left traces of my professional activities. On mailing-lists, on blogs, in simple private emails (that should not have been private), on wikis, each time things are getting more or less lost or at risk to disappear. Most of them (but not all of them) are published using English.
I have a personal blog, where I only publish in French. I publish technical stuff there as well, but not specifically related to work. Things are obviously not that separated, but I have this tendency to want to keep things a bit separated. One of the reasons is that my professional voice is not necessary my personal voice. It's a question of responsibility and fairness with regards to my employers. At W3C, there was this agreement that the W3C staff must stay vendor neutral for doing its job right. It's often frustrating but it's the right decision. You are at W3C for helping companies and employes of those companies work together.
At Opera, I was there to make the Web more open. Andreas Bovens, my Opera manager, never pushed anyone in the awesome Opera Developer Relations Team (I'll have more to say about Opera DevRel Team one day) to promote Opera products. We were working at Opera for making the Web more open and that included that the Web was working on Opera products. We know what happened. In January 2013, Opera fired 10% of its workforce in all departments. The Developer Relations Team who was both evangelizing at conference and working on solving Web compatibility issues was cut by 50%. That's really sad, because it was a lovely team. Unfortunately, Opera has decided to focus on its Ads business.
I'm now working for Mozilla at least for the next 5 months (until the end of my work contract). It has already been one month (I started on July 2, 2013) working obviously on Web Compatibility issues. Lawrence Mandel, my Mozilla manager, had the same stance than Andreas Bovens. I liked it. "We are here to make the Web more open, not only for making the Web usable on Firefox products". These days, the biggest issue is development targetting WebKit. Don't be fooled, it's just a matter of time for another platform to come. In the past, It has been Internet Explorer. Keeping the balance matters. Nobody should dominate. Be Microsoft, Mozilla, Google, Apple, Opera, UCWeb, Nokia, Huawei, Samsung, etc. Nobody. The Web is a platform as long as anyone can participate.
So here it is… this is it. The place for my professional blog posts. I will certainly retroactively published some (or all) of previously published elsewhere blog posts if/when they are still available online.