🎂 My 2^6 months retro at OPT-NC

This content originally appeared on DEV Community and was authored by adriens

About programmer’s day

Programmer’s day is [Wikipedia]

“known as the Day of the Programmer, is a professional day that is celebrated in Russia on the 256th (hexadecimal 100th, or the 28th).”

The fun thing for me is to celebrate something that matches a power of two. So I started wonder what could happen if I would try to celebrate this as a work anniversary.

This blog post is about this trial (and the resulting retro).

About my 2^6=64 months work anniversary

After some computation I discovered that I joined OPT-NC 2^6=64 months ago.

After some reflection I thought it would be useful to use this opportunity to put things in perspective… and then be able to pick the things that I found the most relevant, that help keep my motivation, learning path on track and will to go further.

The retro

The innovation has for me a central place, here are the hottest topics:

• Public innovation before going to OPT-NC, as an outsider
• Public innovation as an insider
• Public APIs journey (RapidAPI, APIGEE)
• Open data journey on Kaggle
• Disruptions around APIs, Open Data & AI
• The DevRel/DevEx way

So finally I found useful to make the retro of my most favorite moments and realizations.

As an outside community contributor

Prior to be part of OPT-NC, I made some public innovations with two main topics.
My goal – already – was to disrupt the end-user experience with public cloud API services.

My thoughts were as follows :

which better way that you really want to be part of it than by offering innovations as part of the recruitment process ?

• Public API for telephone Numbers : annuaire des numéros de mobilis
• Smarter mailboxes with Arduino IoT Cloud platform and IFTTT… which I pitched this way:

“Parole d’agent”

1 year later, as a regular employee, I had the opportunity to be part of the “Paroles d’agent OPT-NC” interview, talking about :

• Core missions
• Data interoperability
• Productivity for collaborators : do more with less
• Collaboration
• Favorite TV-show
• About creativity and LEAN innovation

The case of innovation at “RAPPORT D’ACTIVITÉ 2019”

I also had the great pleasure to get interviewed for the “RAPPORT D’ACTIVITÉ 2019”, see below:

Next, I’ll pick some of the innovations I could push…chosen accordingly to their potential impact on the end-user.

Automation, sms and AI assistants

I had the opportunity to build services and prototypes around sms, below two of the coolest things I could manage to implement with my team (or as a standalone programmer during week-end hackathon ) :

The very first ChatBOT to follow package delivery (langchain)

Thanks to previously published public APIs I was soon able to build the first ever connected smart ChatBOT thanks to a custom Langchain tool:

Telecom packages advisor ChatBOT (LlamaIndex & OpenAI embeddings)

Going SaaS with Data strategy & API marketplace

The more I worked on API Marketplaces and Open data, the more I felt the need to learn more about Data Strategy :

… and I officially kicked off our journey to API Marketplace on APIGEE:

Devrel/DevEx journey with students

To **score how our APIs are easy and useful **I could produce some very cool prototypes and get early feedbacks while producing cool software:

UX total disruption with Flutter app (vs. legacy website)

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API driven website (and user experience)

Going Open Data on Kaggle

While dealing more and more with data, I also felt the need to efficiently store and share datasets.
As an insider I choose to learn more about datascience and dataengineering so we could efficiently deliver ready-to-use data, based on static datasets or APIs.

Recruiting for my team

In any organization, you can’t achieve great things without collaborators, so I started to learn more and work on human resources data, especially on Job offers :

… and finally got the opportunity to get a new SEAT in my team:

…which will be conclusion of this post.

This content originally appeared on DEV Community and was authored by adriens