It’s been a year (actually a bit more) since we arrived in California and it has been an amazing one!

First, on the professional side, I joined Google Photos which we launched at Google IO last year. It’s not every day you launch a new product at Google and it was an amazing experience. The reaction is beyond what I was expecting. People love the product and how magical our search is. I’ve worked on a lot of projects and this one is obviously the most impactful project I have ever worked on. I specifically work on photos.google.com and if you’re doing web development, I hope you’ll appreciate the speed and attention to details of Photos. In my opinion, there’s not much popular web applications that are at this level (but I’m completely biased of course). As for working in Google main campus, well yes, the traffic in the area is bad but I’m able to avoid it most of the time. Plus, the campus is awesome, the facilities are just incredible and it makes working here even better.

On the personal side, settling in was not as hard as we were expecting, Google helped a lot for the transfer and we had not much trouble getting our driver's license, bank accounts and stuff. We’re now renting a nice house in Santa Clara and we really enjoy the wonderful weather. Our quality of life has greatly improved since we’re here and yes, we do a lot of barbecue now :) We’ve already traveled a lot, from Los Angeles to Tahoe, from Quebec to Cancún. We also had friends and family come. But the best is that we can enjoy a nice weekend in the Bay, going to the beach in Santa Cruz just for the afternoon or go for a hike in the forest full of redwoods. The connection to the outdoor is this one last thing that put the cherry on the cake.

On the photography side, well, I joined Google Photos, I could not have found a better project to work on that one that connects directly to one of my passion (the other one being my work). I’m taking a lot of pictures but wasn’t posting much so I’ve decided to force myself to post a picture every day for 2016. We’re 4 months in and I really doubt I will make it but, heh, I’m trying. You can check out this page or just my Instagram feed if you want to follow along. I think my skills are improving but I still have a long way to go. I’m also starting to look into doing timelapse and I’m lurking on some of those drones which do amazing aerial pictures.

And that’s it after a year. I’m kind of giving up on the idea of updating this blog frequently. I’m too busy (or so I convince myself that I am) and I don’t have interesting things to say. Well, maybe I’m just too lazy to write.

I look forward to the following years, whether it’s personal or professional, I’m sure it’s going to be as exciting as this first year was!

2015 will be an exciting year: My wife and I are moving to California!

If you met me recently you might already know it. After more than 7 years in Paris, we decided to change scenery.

As I look back on those 3 years at Google France and 7 years in Paris, I feel very lucky. I had amazing experiences. From working with an awesome team in Capgemini to having a blast at Jolicloud and, of course, Google.

In March, I will leave the Google Cultural Institute. It is the most important project I've ever worked on and one I will brag about all my life. There is nothing more rewarding than working on a project which is helping the world reach Cultural content and Historical patrimoine more easily. It's not the kind of project that makes the tech blog headlines but it's one that will allow future generations to be blown away by paintings, never forget how terrible war is, learn more about the history of the Eiffel Tower or visit beautiful places you may not have a chance to visit in your lifetime. All of this accessible to anyone, anywhere, with an Internet connection.

The team I joined at the Cultural Institute is such an incredible team and I can't thank them enough for everything they gave me. It's been nearly 3 years now and I'm looking forward to a new challenge joining a new team at Google in Mountain View (more on that in another post).

Of course leaving your home country and your family is not an easy choice but we both grew up in houses (not apartments!) and enjoyed the sun and the sea. We feel like it is time to go back to a place where we don't hear our neighbors walking and yelling all the time and where we can do a barbecue WHENEVER we want!

We wanted something new but why so far from France? It's a combination of various things we had in mind when we first started thinking about leaving Paris.

We want a great weather, we can't stand gray sky all the time anymore. We also want to live in a house and have a garden with a barbecue. That might sound ridiculous (and it probably is) but as soon as you are denied those things you want them even more! Finally it's an amazing opportunity to work in the Silicon Valley and my next job is incredibly exciting. Of course nothing is perfect, houses are expensive and the commute can be painful. But in the end, the advantages strongly exceed the drawbacks.

Having access to the city, the beach, mountains or redwoods forests, all in 40 minutes, is definitely another reason.

We will leave France end of February and we look forward to start a new chapter there. I hope to see you either online or in sunny California :)

I took this one by accident. I didn't really planed that a train would pass at this time and that I will get a nice effect with the shutter speed. I like the result.

Note that this is quite a miracle that the full picture is not blurry as I'm not known for being stable when taking pictures :) Usually, all my pictures with a shutter speed below 1/100 are not crisp. I got lucky on this one!

Taken at the Dubai Airport with my iPhone and edited on VSCOCam. No desktop involved. I live in the future!

I crossed the path of this little tree when we were walking on a trail on Kangaroo Island. Can't find the name, so, if anyone knows, let me know!

I just bought a new lens (EF 24-70 f/2.8L II) and was able to try it at the Galerie Lafayette in Paris. I'm very happy with the result, nearly zero post-processing was needed on this one.

I love the princess balloon at the very high of the roof!

Today marks my 1 year Google anniversary! Time really flies when you work in an amazing company on an amazing project.

Since I joined 1 year ago, the Paris office has moved from Opera where our canteen had one of the best view of the Opera Garnier to Rue de Londres, a brand new (restored) building with all the Googley requirements such as a massage room, a 2CV meeting room, an open 24/7 fitness center, a ping-pong table, a great canteen, an auditorium and more.

Also since I joined, the Cultural Institute has released the new platform that will help promote and democratize Culture online in a scalable way. I’ve been lucky to work on this website showing more than 6 millions items and more than 70 exhibits but also on tools to enable non-technical people to create those exhibits and upload those items. I’m now leading a small team in charge of the frontend and we’re working hard to bring more Culture to the web!

Now that I’m not a Noogler anymore (I’m lying, I’m still one), I started a parallel goal I have for a long time. Talking and spreading the little I know. I recently met with people from the French writing press to explain what we (developers) do in Paris and I plan to talk to more events in the future.

It’s really incredible to work in a company that empower its employees to have such an impact. I feel very lucky and I can’t wait to see what this new year will bring me!

I'm about to take the plane for a 24 hours journey that will bring my girlfriend and me on an island off the Tanzania coast. No internet, just diving, I'm pretty excited! We plan to record some of our dives like we did a year ago in Malaysia. You can see the little video my girlfriend made from the videos we took in Malaysia:

Can't wait!

I'm the lucky owner of a brand new EOS 7D with a 50mm 1.4f lense. Really happy with it :)

Today is my last day at Jolicloud.

Looking back at those last 2 years, I'm thankful to have been able to join this incredible team of talents. We've done a huge amount of work, first building the very first HTML5 desktop that seems common now with projects such as Chrome OS, Windows 8 or Boot to Gecko, and lately mainly under the hood for Jolicloud Me. I'm really proud to have been a part of that. I will never thank enough the team for everything that I learned and for the great moments that I had (and the millions of wins at Ping-Pong). It was an awesome experience for me and I’ll definitely keep an eye on what’s next for Jolicloud.

But now it's time for a new adventure! I’m proud to announce that I will join the Cultural Institute @ Google as a Web Developer. I’m very happy to join an amazing team of people in Paris on a challenging, inspiring and awesome project. As you probably suspect, I'm terribly excited! I will start in April after a few days of holidays where I will enjoy trekking in the jungle and diving.

Really looking forward to this!

My very first node module!

Slug generators are a common thing of the web but it's like finding a script to remove accents, everyone has his own solution and it never fits your need! The same applied to me while working on the new Jolicloud. That's why I created uslug (as in unicode slug).

We need to produce slug for obvious reasons, one is clarity in the navigation of our app. I tried first looking for some lib/script that could already do the job. But all I could find were scripts that would keep only [a-zA-Z0-9_-] characters.

It's 2012! I want Chinese people to be able to slug just like English or French people! Punycode is largely supported in browser so it's fine to provide this kind of functionality.

So here's uslug.js, just give it your string and it will slug the hell of it! Here's some example:

  uslug('Быстрее и лучше!') // 'быстрее-и-лучше'
  uslug('汉语/漢語') // '汉语漢語'

Installation is as easy as npm install uslug. I open-sourced the whole thing on github, feel free to report issues and all!

One last thing, I would like to thanks Dave Dash for the kick start and unorm for the JavaScript Unicode Normalization lib.

This post has been cross-posted on the Jolicloud Engineering blog.

I’ve wanted to talk about all the stuff I’m doing at Jolicloud since a few months now but never take the time to. We’re doing amazing things at Jolicloud, we’re pushing the limits of HTML5^[1] — Open Web technologies, in Chromium (I mean, literally, if you could see the nightmare our Chromium builds are living most of the time). This is really exciting to be at this very moment in Web development history.

Two days ago, the W3C created a logo for HTML5 and we are currently featured on their gallery which is really nice. We decided to take a breathe during our insanely fast release schedule to post a quick note on what really is our relation with HTML5. If you didn’t see it yet, I suggest you take a look at it!

As I’m sure tech-savvy people would love to hear more about our experience with HTML5 technologies, we hope to share more with everyone in the near future. And if you see me at an event, feel free to ask me anything and I’ll do my best to answer you!

In other news, the Jolicloud chrome app is doing great and I’ve recently contributed to a much needed website: http://w3fools.com.

And it's not too late to wish everyone an amazing new year. I hope 2011 will be awesome!

[1] HTML is the new HTML5.

If you've used the iPad version of Twitter, you probably love the preview of websites within the app. Well, me too, that's why I decided to try to re-create this behavior on the new Twitter.

So I created a Chrome extension called: Twitter Desktop Notification & Preview URLs (I suck at titles). You can install it by going here.

This is a very early implementation. Detected URLs are displayed in the sidebar under the tweet, you can use "p" to view a fullscreen preview of the URL and navigate with the arrow keys if you have multiple URLs in a tweet. I've also added the ability to have Desktop Notifications alerting when New Tweets are received.

I'll probably release the code soon on Github, there's no magic tricks in this code, I'm just using the Linkify library (like Twitter) to find the URLs. The most important part is probably the use of the sandbox attribute for the iframe element to prevent access to the main document. As I’m not really a pro regarding Javascript, I probably made some things wrong. But as soon as the code will be on Github, people will probably help so that's OK!

There's probably some bugs, feel free to contact me via Buzz or Twitter and I'll try to fix them as soon as possible.

Hope you enjoy it!

And thanks Romain Huet for some Javascript Ninja tips!

As I just came back from vacation. I opened my Google Reader to check the latest Chromium commits. With more than 750 commits for the last week, I decided to make this little post to list all the interesting (in my opinion) stuff regarding Chromium instead of tweeting/buzzing each feature as I usually do when I discover them.

I will not do this on a daily basis. Peter Beverloo is already doing this amazing work for Chromium/WebKit on his blog.

So what's new?

• Apps will open in normal tabs by default but if the user pin the tab, it'll be remembered.
• The speech input attribute is enabled for all platforms and you should use x-webkit-speech instead of speech to use it now.
• About labs (about:labs) is enable on all channels.
• Background Web Apps is a new lab. It allows installed web apps to run in the background at system startup and continue running after all windows are closed.
• The extension management API (more info here) is no longer experimental. It's an interesting API.
• AutoStart for Linux and Windows as landed, this allow to start Chromium without any windows.
• More work has been done on the Google Talk Chat Manager app.
• Chromium hits the 8.x version.
• Web Apps have unlimited quota on the FileSystem API (more info here) if they requested it with the "unlimited_storage" permission.
• Chrome OS will have a mobile activation UI.

And that's all!