Hello and welcome to my personal website! This first post is a short introduction of myself, what I do, and a bit about my plans for my website.

At the time of this post, I’m a Data and Software Engineer at the Desjardins Group in Montréal, Canada. My current work consists of designing and developing data solutions for business intelligence and data analytics using Microsoft’s Data Warehousing and Analytics solutions on Azure.

In the past, I’ve worked on backend and frontend development of on-premises and cloud-based transactional banking solutions, mostly in Java (Spring), Java portlets, and Angular. Transitioning from developing transaction-oriented systems to analytics platforms was an enormous leap for me; it took me into a completely different world, exposing me to new technologies, people, and challenges. It’s an experience I’m truly grateful for!

I’ve also gained experience in DevOps (CI/CD), testing, Agile, and other related technologies and practices in the software development field. More recently, I’ve been studying and working on small projects in data science. Maybe you’ll see some of that here in the future!

Why this website?

I’d like to use this website to improve and maintain my skills across various areas. I’ll be writing to share and document what I’m learning, personal projects, knowledge, and possibly some personal experiences.

In other words, I’ll be using this website as a personal learning tool and knowledge base. If you’re reading this, I hope you find something useful or interesting. Also, feel free to reach out with any questions or comments!

A bit more about me

Some trivia about me:

• I enjoy learning and finding ways to improve and optimize while staying focused on goals and what’s important. Some of my favorite tools for this are Obsidian, coupled with PARA and Zettelkasten.
• I like Linux. While still heavily using Windows, even on my main personal computer, Linux will always have a special place in my heart. On that note, I’m a Vim user (well, the Vim plugins in IntelliJ and VS Code!)
• I speak English, French, Spanish, some Cantonese and a little Japanese. Gutentag!
• I’m a pretty good guitar player. Used to be better, could be better, but it is now just a small hobby.

I like to think that I’m a simple man. If I had to describe myself in a few words, I would paraphrase some of Einstein’s words while hoping of not sounding too cliché: “as simple as possible, but not simpler”.

About this website

I developed this website using Astro, starting from this template: Astrofy template. I’ve added i18n support and did some updates to the included CSS toolset. But what matters most to me is the Markdown support. I plan to leverage the Markdown format for easier use across my (Obsidian) documents and this website. Additionally, using Markdown facilitates portability to other platforms and frameworks, as many already support this workflow.

While making it easy to work with Markdown files, Astro also supports multiple popular frontend frameworks. Although this is a great feature, it does pose some risk for long-term maintainability since integrations could break or fall behind as frameworks evolve. Nonetheless, Astro seems to mitigate this with its Island architecture. It’s also very well supported by the community, as reflected by its popularity on GitHub.

Lastly, it’s also fast, feature-rich, and simple to configure. Still, my focus will remain on simplicity and portability.

There are still some missing pieces to my website and there isn’t much content for now, but it is enough to kick things off with!

What’s next?

Some things I would like to do next include:

• First try at contributing to the Linux repository
• Building a locally hosted agentic LLM personal assistant (ambitious, I know!)
• Building the CV section of my website

That’s it for now. Thank you for reading!