My name is Victor Nicollet. I am the Dark Overlord of all things related to PHP and JavaScript at Tangane, a small software company near Paris.
In case you were wondering, a Dark Overlord is an unholy mix of a Project Manager and a Tech Expert, with a sprinkle of Human Resources and R&D—those henchmen and death rays don’t grow on trees, you know.
If you want to know more about me in a mundane format:
You can also visit my Facebook and LinkedIn profiles.
Recent World Domination Schemes
Since I joined Tangane in April 2008, I have managed eight different projects, leading teams of two to seven people in Paris, Lyon, Argentina and Algeria, and provided my two technical cents to several other projects in Java and .NET. While intranet projects obviously can’t be seen, some of these projects are actually on the internet:
Jamin Puech (www.jamin-puech.com)
A Magento-based e-Commerce web site for fashionable handbags.
Matching Numbers (www.matching-numbers.net)
An exclusive online club for exceptional car owners. Features Facebook-like full AJAX navigation.
Tangane (www.tangane.com)
Our corporate website. Nothing special in itself, but it sits atop an open source CMS that was heavily modified to support multiple websites with one install.
The Early Years
Before I joined Tangane, I studied Computer Science (MSc, 2007) and Economical Science (MSc, also 2007) at the Ecole normale supérieure in Paris.
I used to be a part-time C++ video game developer eventually releasing in late 2004 a $9.95 PocketPC game called Darklaga : Cannonball Symphony. This also led me to contributing two articles to two books on game development:
Beginning Game Programming (ISBN: 159863805X)
Design and Content Creation (ISBN: 1598638084)
I also worked as a Computer Science Teaching Assistant from 2005 to 2009 for the Caml Light courses at the Lycée Louis le Grand.
The Dark Secret
Slow learners need weeks of training and years of practice to become skilled in their area of expertise. Fast learners «get it» within days, and become fully operational within weeks. Intelligence is certainly a factor, but it does not matter as much as one would expect.
How fast is a given person going to relate new concepts to her experience? Is she going to sift through all the feedback she gets, positive or negative, for lessons or ideas? Faced with new responsibilities, is she going to try something, anything at all, or freeze in fear because of the possible consequences? Does she think about the issue at all between 6pm and 9am? Is she going to repeat the same mistakes twice? Does she think everything is fine when everything is not fine?
But being a fast learner is a skill that is hard to demonstrate. You can demonstrate great skill with a programming language by single-handedly writing an open source program, you can demonstrate great leadership or management skills by successfully leading several teams and managing several projects, and you can demonstrate great artistic skills with a well-stocked portfolio, because these skills work on the basis of «if you did it ten times, you can do it eleven times»
By definition, you cannot learn the same thing ten times in a row, and saying that you will learn how to manage a team in two weeks because you learned how to code in PHP in two weeks is a bit of a stretch. Because of this, management positions tend to be filled either through internal promotion or with senior managers from outside the company.
Back in 2008, the main reason I went for Tangane instead of a thousand-employee huge IT corporation is because Tangane took the gamble of letting me join as a project manager. Either I could hit the road running and manage projects appropriately, or I would screw up irrevocably on my first assignment. You can guess which happened.
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