Michel Billard

Well, it seems I have been working at Hint Innovation for 2 years now (as of August 13). I’m happy that I can say that I still love my job. In my previous work experiences I usually got bored after a few weeks, good thing they were just internships. I guess having more responsibilities and real challenges makes my brain happy.

Retrospective

I’ve learned a lot in my two years and I now know myself a lot more (work-wise). I’ve seen a few employees come and go (though I’m still the youngest…) and worked on plenty of interesting projects. I’m still keeping up with the latest advancements and I feel like I have the skills to improve my field. I’m feeling more confident with my writing skills on my blogs which I’m glad I started doing regularly.

The company also improved a lot, moving from a 10 feet by 10 feet room to a huge 1000+ square feet office. We also improved our processes and we can now produce code much faster than we used to. We learned from our mistakes and we have great things planned for the future.

Future

First of all, I plan to stay at Hint, mostly because we have a great team and we have what it takes to make a difference in our field. In the last two years, we fixed a lot of issues in the way we handled clients and we can now use this experience to go ahead and create better applications than ever before. I now have decent experience in my field and I (and my bosses) feel that I now have what is needed to start managing/leading people. This is not entirely new to me since I’ve helped the various employees that started working at Hint, but I think I could handle a small team. That’s why, as more employees start working for us, I would love to take the role of a team lead.

On the personal side, I will keep blogging (mostly at crossbrowser.net) and I will do my best to start one of my many projects that are currently just ideas.

As you may know, I have started blogging a bit more regularly over at Crossbrowser.net. I’m still in my early attemps at blogging and the quality of the text probably shows that. I’m still happy so far of what I’ve written, hopefully a few more people will start following and commenting. My goal for this year is to write at least one entry per week, I already have content for a dozen posts, but I need to learn to take more time to write.

Here are a few interesting posts (in my opinion) you might’ve missed:

• Code Usability
• Process Usability
• Password Management 101
• Handling Users

In the past few weeks I improved the navigation and layout. I also made some improvements to help with SEO (Search engine optimization) (on this website too). If the traffic gets good enough, I’ll probably try to put up some advertisements (non obtrusive of course). In the meantime, I’ll keep posting to improve my writing.

Over at my other blog, I talk about the importance of owning a domain even if you don’t plan on having a website.

Here’s a quote from the post:

The most important use you can make with your own domain is having access to an infinity of email addresses. You probably already have at least one @gmail.com, @yahoo.com, @hotmail.com, @whatever-free-email-service.com address, probably 2 or more, everyone does. However, none of these gives you as much freedom as having your own domain does.