Articles

I write about what I learn: programming, productivity, and building side projects.

Jul 2026 EN Vasco Engineering ↗

Four Agent Frameworks in Sixteen Months

How Gama went from LangChain to LangGraph to Google ADK to Mastra to the Claude Agent SDK — and what we'd tell our December 2024 selves.

Apr 2026 EN Between the Prompts ↗

If Claude Writes the Code, What Makes Me Still a Developer?

It's been three months since I last wrote a line of code.

Dec 2025 EN Between the Prompts ↗

Watching, Not Waiting: When AI Coding Crossed the Speed Threshold

I know that feedback about using AI as a dev is so mid-2025, but I feel there are still some things to say.

Nov 2025 EN Between the Prompts ↗

Designing AI‑Ready Systems: Making Code Easy for Assistants

Most leverage from AI doesn't come from writing AI code—it comes from writing code that AI can use. When your system exposes clear contracts and ex...

Oct 2025 EN Vasco Engineering ↗

Building a Modular AI Copilot: From Monolithic to Dynamic Context

How we built Vasco's Copilot — from a LangChain-and-Gemini prototype to a modular architecture where each page declares its own context and tools.

Sep 2025 EN Between the Prompts ↗

Seven Hours, Zero Internet, and Local AI Coding at 40,000 Feet

Seven hours on a plane, zero internet, and a curiosity about local AI coding. That's how I found myself downloading 13GB of AI models in an airport...

Aug 2025 EN Between the Prompts ↗

AI-Assisted Development: A Three-Act Play

Developers on my team use Cursor's Tab feature. Designers use vibe-coded prototypes to gather feedback from stakeholders. I rely on Claude Code to ...

Aug 2025 EN Between the Prompts ↗

Turning Claude Code Into My Best Design Partner

When I first started using Claude Code, I had a naive approach to working with it. I would describe the task directly in the prompt, press Enter, a...

Aug 2025 EN Between the Prompts ↗

Two Hours with Cursor Changed My Mind About AI Coding

For the first time in my career, I have absolutely no idea what the software engineer job will look like in five or ten years.

Oct 2024 EN Spliit Blog ↗

Spliit by the Stats: Usage, Costs, Donations

A transparency report on Spliit's first year, sharing figures on visits and usage, the roughly $115 monthly hosting costs, the donations that nearl...

Oct 2024 EN Spliit Blog ↗

Spliit Is Now Available in Eight Languages

Thanks to open-source contributors from around the world, Spliit now supports eight languages, and this post credits the people who added each tran...

Feb 2024 EN Spliit Blog ↗

We Need an Open Source Alternative to Splitwise

After Splitwise began limiting free usage in late 2023, this post argues that a widely used app should be more than just free, and explains why bui...

Jan 2024 EN Spliit Blog ↗

Announcing Receipt Scanning Using AI

Spliit now lets you create an expense by taking a photo of a receipt, using OpenAI's GPT-4 with Vision to automatically extract the title, category...

Oct 2023 EN

13 tips for better Pull Requests and Code Review

Would you like to become better at crafting pull requests and reviewing code? Here are the 13 tips from my latest book that you can use in your dai...

Aug 2023 EN

The simplest example to understand Server Actions in Next.js

Server Actions are a new feature in Next.js. The first time I heard about them, they didn’t seem very intuitive to me. Now that I’m a bit more used...

Jul 2023 EN

Intro to React Server Components and Actions with Next.js

React is living something these days. Although it was created as a client UI library, it can now be used to generate almost everything from the ser...

Jun 2023 EN

How to give code review as a junior developer?

By focusing on learning, providing constructive feedback with a positive tone, and embracing the opportunity to contribute, junior developers can m...

Jun 2023 EN

How well should I know React before applying to my first job?

A recurring question I hear from people learning React: “how do I know if I’m ready to apply to junior React developer jobs?”. Very often, they’re ...

May 2023 EN

A better learning path for React with server components

What if we took advantage of React Server Components not only to improve how we use React, but also how we help people learn it from the beginning?

Apr 2023 EN

Display a view counter on your blog with React Server Components

A short tutorial with a cool use case for React Server Components, Streaming and Suspense with Next.js: adding a view counter on a blog, calling th...

Mar 2023 EN

Using Zod & TypeScript for more than user input validation

If you have ever created an API or a form accepting user input, you know what data validation is, and how tedious it can be. Fortunately, libraries...

Feb 2023 EN

Display your Gumroad products on your Next.js website

If you sell some products on Gumroad and also have a personal website, maybe you’d like to automatically list your products on this website. And if...

Feb 2023 EN

Use Next.js Image component in posts with Markdown

Next.js has a wonderful Image component that lazy loads images and optimizes their dimensions. Here is how to use it when generating your blog from...

Nov 2022 EN

Create OG images for your blog with Next.js

Vercel recently announced a new library to generate OpenGraph (OG) images. A short tutorial to see how to use it to generate OG images for your Nex...

Mar 2022 EN

Combining scripts and DSLs is Kotlin’s most underrated feature

The more I play with Kotlin, the more convinced I am that a combo of two of its features is vastly underrated: first, the ability to create domain-...

Mar 2022 EN

Walk in the steps of successful makers, and fail

Following advice by successful people might not be enough. A short essay about survivorship bias, and how it can make you forget the most important...

Feb 2021 EN

Purchasing Power Parity: fair pricing for your SaaS product

Using Purchasing Power Parity, you can offer a fair pricing based on your user’s location. Here I explain what it is, then I show you how I impleme...

Jan 2021 EN

How I use Pandoc to create programming eBooks

Here is the story of how I built my eBooks, especially the last one. After some trial and errors, in the end, I used the same recipe as the two pre...

Jan 2021 EN

Reimplement Redux with vanilla React in 12 lines of code

Redux is an awesome library to handle the state of big applications, React or not. But when you think about it, the basic features of Redux can be ...

Jan 2021 EN

Understand how React hooks work

The reason hooks cause developers to struggle is that they look simple, just basic functions, but they are a lot more complex than that. The comple...

Nov 2020 EN

Back to basics with Node.js and Express, the time of a side project

Although I love React and am more used to single-page applications (SPA), I decided to leave them aside the time of a side project and to use plain...

Oct 2020 EN

Why you should have side projects

As a developer, you may have acquired some skills that you don’t find the time to practice. Or you may want to learn new ones, but your daily job d...

Jul 2020 EN

Create an animated 3D book in CSS, step by step

A couple of days ago, I created a 3D version for the book I’m writing, with CSS only. Because I couldn’t find an easy way to do it, I created a sma...

Jul 2020 EN

On distraction and developer productivity

When twenty developers were asked to keep a precise diary of what tasks they worked on during the day minute by minute, the results were surprising...

May 2020 EN

I’m writing a new book: Become an Outstanding Developer

When you’ve been working as a developer for several years, improving at coding is not enough to become better at your job. Of course, it’s a very i...

Apr 2020 EN

I tried Flutter for a week and made an app

It’s been some time that I hear about Flutter, the UI library by Google supposed to be a concurrent for React. I’m a huge fan of React, and on the ...

Oct 2019 EN

Create a React hook to add dark theme to your app

Thanks to a recent evolution in mobile and desktop operating systems, it is more and more common for users to expect two UI themes for apps and web...

Sep 2019 EN

This blog is proudly powered by Gatsby (with some super powers)

This blog has been using Gastby for a year now. Before that I used a home-made tool I was proud of, but it was very minimalistic. Switching to Gast...

Sep 2019 EN

Beginner Guide to Deep Work for Developers

Have you ever dreamed to wake up one morning and realize you felt different, more powerful. As if you had this super power inside of you that it wa...

Aug 2019 EN

One year as a morning person

I’ve been living in Montréal for almost two years now. I’m currently going in vacation in France to see friends and family, for the fifth time in t...

Aug 2019 EN

Lost with Redux and sagas? Implement them yourself!

You can use everyday a library such as React, Redux or Redux-Saga. You can be perfectly efficient with it. You can be able to tell others why it is...

Feb 2019 EN

React hooks: get the current state, back to the future

React Hooks are trully awesome, but the more I play with them the more I discover tricks, and sometimes spend a lot of time figuring out why my cod...

Feb 2019 EN

So I wrote a technical book 😁

Big week for me: I finished writing my eBook in French about React, and I couldn’t be prouder. Eight months, and it was not easy, but it’s so worth...

Oct 2018 FR

Est-il utile d’apprendre React ?

Plusieurs tweets m’ont interpelé récemment, par rapport au fait que l’écosystème JavaScript s’est dégradé, car concentré autour de plus en plus d’o...

Sep 2018 FR

Pourquoi j’écris un livre sur React ?

Voilà quelques mois, j’étais à la recherche d’un nouveau projet personnel. Bien souvent ce type de recherche aboutit au développement d’une nouvell...

Mar 2018 EN

Bootstrap a Reason-React project with Parcel

Not that long ago I used Create-React-App a lot to quickly boostrap my React projects. That’s why I naturally used Reason Scripts when I wanted to ...

Jan 2018 EN

Create reusable high-order React components with Recompose

Writing reusable components in React is something every React developer care about (or should care about). Wether it’s to create a toolbox of style...

Aug 2017 EN

Create a simple and tested Redux-like app with Reason React

In the past few weeks I’ve become a big fan of Reason, and in particular its association to React with Reason React. And because both Reason and Re...

May 2017 EN

Writing modern JavaScript code

Remember when JavaScript was a language used to make elements change on the page when the cursor was over them? These days are over, every language...

Nov 2016 EN

Play with cryptography with OpenPGP.js

For about a year now, I use ProtonMail as my mail provider. If you don’t know it, you should definitively give it a look! The mails are encrypted _...

Nov 2016 EN

Use the coolest ES6 features everywhere

If you use JavaScript you probably know that recently a lot of new features arrived with ES2015 (also known as ES6): classes, const/let keywords, d...

Oct 2016 EN

A new blog, a new blog management system

Today I’m starting a new blog. I started a few blogs in the past. Personal blogs, where I talked about a lot of things. This blog is very different...

Sep 2015 FR

Vivre sans télé, c’est possible ? (Spoiler : oui)

En réponse à cet article sur Medium, voici mon retour d’expérience sur la suppression de la télé de mon quotidien. Pour commencer, je pense avoir é...

Aug 2015 FR

Comment j’ai l’intention de reprendre le contrôle de mes données

À l’occasion du (fantastique) dernier BreizhCamp, j’ai eu le plaisir d’assister à la keynote du fondateur et ex-président de Mozilla Europe, Trista...

May 2015 FR

Bien développer est-il un art ?

Ces derniers temps j’ai entendu plusieurs fois que des développeurs passionnés considéraient le développement comme un art. Par exemple, le manifes...