Culture

[Or what I did learn from javascript 101, even though I am not a software engineer] When I was young(er), I’ve started my career in multinational corporations. One of the key things which struck me at that time was that, even though each of this company was quite hierarchical, every manager must, to evolve in their career, have made a compulsory training on the field. In other words, whether you are a finance or marketing director, you have to regularly play the role of a sales…

Hi all, Happy new year! 2017 is now over, and it’s time for us to contemplate everything that happened in Octo Technology Australia and appraise our success and failures. Hidden Tech Challenge Late 2017, we launched a geolocated quiz game in Sydney, and it was a lot of fun. Not only did we build the product from the idea to the delivery, but we also handled the communication, animation and follow-up of the game.

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This is the story of a team. A bunch of 11 aspiring software craftsmen who decided to change things around and get their job done in a better way. The story takes place between the 30th and the 50th iteration of the development process of a software. This software is a website serving over 2 million regular users and providing legal information and services to 65 million French citizens. Chapter one: Start from what hurts and set a direction Leaky pipeline It is normal that…

The life science sector faces great challenges when the time comes to meet modern digital opportunities. This sector is incredibly dynamic, both from an economic and a scientific point of view, but innovation in the lab often comes in pair with a deep evolution in the information system strategy. In this article, we will first focus on the Swiss Lemanic area landscape and see how the main computational trends encountered there are representative of the domain at large. We will then try to extract the…

I attended DevOps Days Paris, for which Octo was a sponsor, on April 14 and 15. Here's a small synthesis of the various talks I attended, and the one I presented. DevOps Days are mostly focused on the human side of DevOps, and therefore featured a lot of non-technical talks on the subject. The talks emphasized the importance of empathy and respect, of understanding peoples fears and wants, and of putting yourself in other's shoes. There was also a strong focus on challenging our assumptions…