Level up

What I have delayed as long as I could finally happened: deciding on what to do professionally speaking. Yup, it is almost time for me to leave University after nine years studying tons of different topics. Fortunately, I had the opportunity to work beside my studies. Also, Open Source gave me some keys to explore the real world by myself so I knew what a “job” was. I was just too scared, and making choices has often been complicated to me.

Three years ago, I thought working for a big (read famous) company in the Bay was what I wanted the most. I even did some interviews that all went well but I never joined any company. I received various job proposals from all over the world and some of them were really interesting but, again, I was not excited enough. After three years of doing research, I knew that I wasn’t a good fit for Academia. Consequently, I decided not to pursue this path.

Over the years, I started to care more and more about humans, rights, and ethical behaviours. I also wanted to become a better version of myself, by rethinking my life on the Internets, reading more, encouraging sharing and diversity with Clermont’ech, creating projects that target a wider audience than usual, and even by giving lectures and talks all over the world! I also “grew up” by traveling a lot over the last three years. Among all my trips, visiting my friend Igor who is currently living in Berlin has been a revelation: I wanted to live and work in Berlin.

Earlier this year, I thought about working for a non-for-profit organization a lot: I wanted to work abroad and for a good cause. Organizations such as EFF and RSF caught my attention. I found positions in Berlin too. At that time, this seemed to be my best (and also, only viable) plan. But then, @julienmaupetit came to me with a deal…

After several months thinking and discussing together, I am extremely happy to announce that Julien and I are now partners at TailorDev. We want to develop modern tools to ease scientific collaboration and promote Open Science Data in research. The mission and its strong underlying values align perfectly with my career goals ♥ ♥ ♥

Being the “CTO” of such a company comes with tons of new exciting challenges and that is why I chose this opportunity rather than working for an organization (not saying there are no challenges in non-for-profit orgs here). Creating a startup has always been something I wanted to try at least once and that’s the right moment I believe. As both of us are happy to run a remote first company, moving to Berlin will probably still be possible. This also means that we will be able to work with people from everywhere ;-)

Right now, we are working hard on artich.io, a collaborative platform for scientists! Researchers reading this blog post, if you are not registered yet, you should! We are former scientists in bioinformatics and software engineering, we know how things work in Academia. That is why we put all our energy and skills to offer you with efficient tools!

TL;DR

I chose to start a new adventure at TailorDev. We build artich.io, a platform for researchers.