Thoughts and experiences from building a small business

Creating a business using open data

Open Data isn’t new but as time goes by, it gets more available and its quality keeps increasing. By definition, this data is free but is there a way to create value and launch a sustainable business using it? For some the question is even tougher: how can we expect…

Getting hired as a remote worker

Over the last few months, I got to do about a hundred interviews to hire new members of our remote team. Here are the most frequent issues I experienced. Most of them seem obvious, but you would be surprised how frequently they happened.

How to disable some of your website’s endpoints in seconds

They are cases when you need to disable some endpoints of a website as fast as possible. For example, in the case were an issue on an endpoint is causing all of your website to go down. Or because you need to limit the traffic…

Not raising funds to stay small and happy

“Any plans to raise funds?” is a question I get a lot. Here are a few of the reasons why we intend to stay bootstrapped.

Conventional wisdom says you start building an MVP, maybe acquire a few customers and raise funds. If you go…

The real legal question for your startup

In France, we love to complain how Google, Airbnb or Uber aren’t French companies. Reasons are numerous but I’ll look at this issue from the point of legal regulations. Specifically, how companies can find themselves pioneering a new sector both commercially…

Be Like Joey Tribbiani, Embrace The Fear

Entrepreneurship is awesome! Except of course when you start putting down a few numbers on paper. Suddenly, your steady income feels tough to attain. Depending on the type of business and how ‘new’ it may be, those numbers can get quickly depressing.

Postgresql’s Jsonb brings all the NOSQL you’ll ever need into Rails

If you ever had a project in which data to save to your database would come in all shapes and size you certainly had this dilema : Should I make lots of models, lots of migration and lots of column ? Should I…

Super simple worker pools in Go using channels

I’m sure you’ve had to write some code where you have a few hundred thousand items and need to do some work on them. Performing the jobs serially would be too long. And launching everything at once with goroutines isn’t possible because of some…