Today, it’s time for me to say goodbye. Of course, I’m going to miss my colleagues, and I’ll keep an eye on what’s going on in this very interesting startup. Again, thanks to my three bosses, who offered me this amazing first job opportunity.

I have plans for this month: With Victor, I’ll visit some friends (Wendy, Mathieu, Elsa, and others) in San Francisco between March 13th and 23rd.

When not in SF, I’ll be working on an awesome but top-secret project with my friend Cédric. More on that when It’ll be released.

After my trip, I’m going to start a super exciting new adventure, but I’ll write about it later on.

Photo credit: Elsa

Of course, this hotel might not be a good one for me, because I have hard times trying to sleep, but I assume it’s OK for most of people. And you can sleep in a 4star class bed for approximately €40, so I guess it’s worth the price.

There’s a lot to learn from the 9 hour capsule hotel in Tokyo. I tend to think that most web applications should embrace the same key principles of this hotel: high quality, minimalism, and easy to understand features.

I’ll certainly spend a night there when I visit Tokyo someday.

Via Design Boom (shared by Mathieu)

The 2UNFOLD laptop bag is definitely going into my wishlist. I heard some women spend more than €400 for a simple LV bag. I guess €379 would be worth it according to the 2UNFOLD’s versatility.

Via Piotr’s tumblelog

Again, thanks to Exsonvaldes for the show. You guys totally fit my definition of what an artist should be: better on stage than on CD. “There’s no place like homes”, their new album has been released today on the iTunes Store, and it’s worth buying (I bought it saturday after the show, so I know what I’m talking about).

Also, thanks to Thien & Laurent for hosting and organizing the show, but also thanks to Victor for hosting me this week-end.

Video credit & more info: Victor

WTF is it exactly?

Well, to make it short, Bllsht.net is a place where any twitter user can denounce another user and proclame he/she is saying lame stuff. It might be a bit mean at first, but it’s in fact really funny. It was built because Victor and I noticed that the blogosphere, especially the one from Paris, has a lot of haters.

What’s the point?

A friend of mine told me he didn’t get the point. Well, it’s true that voting x or y is full of shit is not that interesting. The real point is personal. Of course, it’s all about the fun, but it’s also a matter of skills. I love side-projects because they are like a playground where I can try new technologies. I could have done this website using LAMP stack, which is certainly the most used stack in the world, but I chose different technologies to improve my skills.

The technical stack.

The app is hosted on a very basic server (and very low-cost), it’s not even 64bits enhanced.

The webserver is Lighttpd, mostly because I think Apache’s configuration is a real pain in the ass neck. Lighty serves static content such as images and css files.

The code is on Tornado, the open-source Python framework that powers FriendFeed (Lighty acts as a reverse proxy). I like it because I like the way you can code different actions according to the HTTP method, which makes the code a lot more RESTful (the code is a bit similar as web.py apps or Google App Engine apps). If you’re a developer too and don’t know about Tornado, you might wanna have a look at my basic Tornado app on GitHub. Plus, I’m getting a bit sick of PHP, which is really messy. Python, on the other hand only let you write nice and clean code.

All the stored data is stored on MongoDB, which is a DocDB such as CouchDB (but much more advanced imho). At first I’ve been playing around K/V store like Redis, but MongoDB includes in some ways classic RDBMS features, which is not negligible…

I might be writing soon a blog note about creating twitter mashups and using the twitter API.

A big thanks to my friend Victor for the design, and to my friend Wendy, who was really helpful for copywriting (yes, my english is crappy…). Also, thanks to the early beta-testers for their feedback.

I don’t know what I’m gonna do with the old design, maybe a Tumblr theme. So stay tuned!

Feel free to leave any suggestion/criticism in the comments section. Even if you’re drunk.

This is a picture of the Koutoubia Mosque. I guess it is this Mosque, but I’m actually not able to confirm. The whole set is available on Flickr. Sorry, the battery of my camera went down during the trip. Also, you may want to see more pics of this trip.

Again, thanks to my three bosses (Julien Romanetto, Frédéric Montagnon & Gilles Moncaubeig) for organizing this awesome trip!

This project was launched by Crush + Lovely (and Deltree), one of the coolest creative studio in the world. If you don’t know about ‘em, you really should have a look at their gorgeous website. Seeing so many gorgeous stuff makes me think that I wouldn’t mind to work at in (or launch) a company like Crush + Lovely

Via Mathieu

Please, note that comments in French will be ignored (and maybe deleted, because I am devilish haha), as well as impolite ones.

Enjoy

I remember when I first discovered Cocoon, two years ago, on Jennifer’s old blog (The new one is called Baskets & Minijupe, which literaly means Sneakers & Miniskirt), on a Friday afternoon. Pownce was alive at this time, and I had no idea that this little girl met on a hype social network would become one of my very best friends. And now, everytime I hear about Cocoon, It makes me think of her.

Take care & get better Jen.

FYI, this painting is part of Public Ad Campaign, an initiative of Jordan Seiler and a few artists (including Philip Lumbang) who just replaced dozens of illegal billboard ads in New York by street art paintings (more details on the NYTimes). It reminds me a bit of DoGood HQ, a browser plug-in, which is supposed to replace ads with green related initiatives ads.

More cute friendly bears saying “Oh, Hi” on Unurth.

Via Good.is.

There are tons of things that reminds me everyday that she’s not here anymore. Even the smallest things. Every single detail reminds me that she’s gone. Every single change reminds me that life goes on. Yes, life goes on. But it’s definitely not the same. Unfortunately.

I’ve been up for 40 hours. I’m tired. It’s been 7 months. And I miss her.

Photo credit: Elsa.

I like that it has killer eco-friendly features, such as a smart energy facade or a green rooftop. More pics and details on Morphopedia.

Via TreeHugger.

Oh, by the way, The new web server is exclusively a web server under lighty. DNS belong to my registrar (and I think it’s a pain in the ass). All my e-mails now belong to the cloud (Google Apps for your domain). Finally.

And if you like nicely displayed recipes, I highly recommend the French recipee books serie called “Mon cours de cuisine” (Marabout editions) which is really gorgeous. As we say here: Bon apétit!

Via Signal Vs Noise (37 Signals)

We always see hypothetical consequences of the hypothetical rise of the sea level on TV documentaries. But I think we don’t have any idea of what it would be like in the real world. That’s the goal of the Watermark project. A series of large-scale projections showing the future water level were displayed during Feb 2009 in Bristol, and they plan to do it in a other cities, first in the UK, then globally.

I think it’s a pretty good way to make people care about the world they live in. And I can’t wait to see it in other cities. Because as they say, what’s happening cannot be left to scientists and politicians responsibilities.

Well, I was a bit tired of the current design (by the way, it’s still available on http://bastienlabelle.fr/v1/), I was thinking that there was not enough contrast, I didn’t like the colors or the way font is displayed anymore.

Still following the KISS principle, I wanted to realize something cleaner than it was (and believe me, it was not an easy thing). So I started reducing the visible text. Then, as I mentioned above, I was sick of the contrast. I have done the contrary of the first design. Before it was grey on black, and now it’s grey on white. It was not black vs white, because black on white or the opposite really hurt my eyes.

I was also kind of tired of Helvetica. So I figured out Arial might be cleaner if I reduced the text size. Actually, I should have thought about reducing the font size before, because Helvetica and Arial feel kind of the same at this size.

Last point, I wanted to break conventions, do something different. I like space, minimalism, clean things, Northern Europe architecture style. But all these things are conventionnal. So I thought maybe having the whole content starting from the bottom might be a cool idea, like it could be on a 80’s swiss style print ad. At first, it may be kind of shocking, but I think we get used to it really quickly.

Then I figured out it was ready to go live. And it looks like this:

Like I did with the old one, I may certainly iterate on that design, so if you have any ideas about how to improve this new design, comments are welcome.

I have been teasing some friends about it, and there are very different opinions. Well, I guess I just can’t please everyone.

PS: I don’t feel like I’m a real rockstar, but hey, I couldn’t find a good easter egg with the word “ninja”.

Scott Harrison’s cause is certainly one of the most respectable causes. It’s called Charity Water, and its aim is to provide fresh and clean water to every single people on earth. What this guy has done so far is amazing and impressive. And it all started with a birthday party.

With My Charity Water You can run your own campaign for raising money, so everyone can become a fundraiser (100% of donations , and the website UI really rocks.

By the way, as some of you may know, it’s my birthday on saturday. I’ll turn 23. As a web developer, My goal has always been to make the web a better place. Today, I have the opportunity to make the world a better place. At least, being part of it.

If you want to give some money to people really in need, you can donate through my birthday campaign on http://mycharitywater.org/bastienlabelle. Or you can also create your own campaign.

There are about 6 billion people in the world. One billion still don’t have access to clean water, and $1 is the amount required to provide clean water to one human being for a year. What if the other 5 billion would give $1 a year? Spread the word to make it happen.

And I think this video reminded me why I’m in love with my city.

Almost everything is beautiful in this video (Big hands to the Canon 5D). OK, except the use of Comic Sans at the end.

Video by Objectif Terre. Music by Radiohead. Shared by Laurent on Twitter.

First of all, the minimalist style. I wanted to get rid off all the visual pollution and focus on the content. There is no sidebar, not a lot of visual design, no patterns, etc. On this blog, the content matters, and nothing else. There’s no need of shiny stuff like sharing widgets for example (I assume that if people want to share, they just have to send a link on Twitter or by e-mail).

Then, my blog is all about interaction. If you browse a post page, there’s quite no diffference between the post and each comment. Why this decision? I think it enhances participation, so everyone here is kind of equal to each other. There’s absolutely no difference between you and me, comments are entirely part of the content, so maybe people are more likely to read the post and the comments.

And finally, the last UX and funny thing, is more like an easter egg. Have you noticed this small bubble “whoami”? In case you’re not a geek, whoami is a UNIX program that let you know your user ID. Here, it opens the main page of my website, which is like my resume, and explains quite everything about me.

The point is that you don’t have to spend hours on a super elaborated graphic design with ton of javascript stuff to create a cool UX. Just go back to the basics, and Keep it simple, stupid!