About me

on me traite d’adulescent! encore un concept pété inventé par des grands.

As we all have to introduce ourselves when we join a community, i decided to maintain a single, up to date reference about me.

My live

I live at Strasbourg, France (close to Germany), got maried and 2 almost bachelors.

I’m “ethical vegetarian” since 2008, wannabe vegan and kinda activist. Earthlings reflects my position. But i don’t judge anyone as i’m guitly, myself, not beeing vegan.

I grew up in open innovation (comupter clubs worked this way) and learned about GPL onlyin 90’s (linux, perl, vi, … since circa 1995). Nothing competes with vim in my heart. i’m in the process of replacing perl with raku and linux with openbsd.

To me, free software is not only about the obvious superiority of open inovation to build good software: it’s also about my political points of view about convivialism and freedom.

As member of the OSS community

I authored and i maintain some modules on CPAN, wrote cpan2port as a helper while installing koha on mac using macports (i worked at Biblibrel then).

i wrote some parts of koha, sympa, and patches to many open source projects (dh-make-perl, zsh, sqlite, perl, raku documentation, …).

I got some projects, modules and rcfiles on eiro@github.

I’m vice-president of the "Mongueurs de Perl", I’m also involved in the OSS events (as organizer or/and speaker).

about Perl, Unix and Acmeism at

my programming journey

today, i’m aware that

  • there is No silver bullet and we all have to be polyglot.
  • Acmeism is a good thing
  • documentation and tests must preceed implementation
  • if you want to learn to program, learn to “not program” instead (i mean: are you sure you’re already a poweruser of the already available tools?)

it started long time ago

  • ’80: programming useless stuff in logo, basic: just learning.
  • early ’90: gave a chance to pascal before choosing C
  • late ’90: discovered unix toolchain (shell, build automations, editors …) and fall in love with Perl.
  • early 2000s, i gave a chance to Python, Ruby and Lua. Ruby has some things perl5 can be jalous of (Raku push them even further) but all of them miss all the good things we learnt from unix culture and the awesome perl ecosystem. Perl and vim are very similar in the way that there was a time you didn’t learn "Perl" or "vim" but “the unix ecosystem”, a set of tools sharing the same culture, Perl and vim where just parts of this ecosystem so it was much more easier to learn than nowadays (because newcomers are comming with a completly different cultural background). Unix culture is not hard: it’s just misunderstood and poorly taught.
  • late 2000s: a colleague of mine introduced me to the plan9 world and cat-v. I read some more conceptual papers on unix philosophy from people like Rob Pike, Russ Cox (also known for go lang). acme completly changed the way. i use vim (it’s much more than an editor, it’s my GUI for driving everything i need).
  • late 2000s: a colleague of mine introduced me to the plan9 world and cat-v. the pugs project made me aware of the rise of functionnal paradigm. I jumped in playing with Haskell and i have to admit i’m not productive with it but i changed the way i write my programs. i wrote _PERLUDE. Nils introduced me to Clojure and now i keep a eye on _PURESCRIPT, haskell, …

Now i’m not a developper anymore and i code for fun (when i have enought time and motivation). The Ted Nelson’s Computers for the cynics lectures also changed the way i think computer industry.

i’m interested improving skills in many fields without having enought time. including GUI/DataViz, low level (plan9 kernel?), functionnal programming (finally be productive with haskell, clojure and so on).

the tools i use

  • my prefered shell is zsh. zsh uze is my attempt to build an ecosystem on it (using namespaces, tests and shippable libraries).
  • my prefered linux distributions are debian when the main purpose is stability and arch linux to experiment very new stuff. rpm based distributions desapointed me every time i tried them and the next distro i’ll give a chance to will be _GUIX. If i have an opportunity to work with a BSD again (i loved the experience), it would be NetBSD.
  • vim is my only one editor for much more than editing (i use it as interactive client for RT, SQL and LDAP servers, mail composition, …).
  • my prefered window manager is dwm but i use GNOME at work because it is a much better candidate to promote linux as a desktop-ready solution (i actually found it much better than Mac)
  • under , i use _CYGWIN, vim, Putty, powershell, git extensions