Hello Gérard! Shed some light on your life’s journey.
I grew up on a farm in the deep French countryside of Normandy. I spent most of my time outdoors: mountain biking, fishing, building shacks, driving tractors...
At the same time, I developed an early fascination with everything related to technology. We were lucky enough to have a computer room at elementary school (IBM PS/1 as "server" and Thomson MO5) and a geek teacher. I didn't necessarily see myself going into IT, especially after my 3-day end-of-middle-school internship in an IT services company, which consisted of deploying Windows 95 on 20 PCs one by one with 26 floppy disks... fascinating! 😉
I went on to scientific studies, not really knowing where I was going. Then, in my last year of high school, I fell in love with history and geography, and I could see myself following that path. But as sometimes things don't go as planned, I ended up in a Computer Science course specializing in Software Analysis and Design—and I had a great time!😎
What is your professional background?
I've had quite different roles in IT, which today give me a good breadth of vision. I started as an apprentice developer on JAVA network tools in the R&D department for a telecom provider. Then I worked as a developer for a public retirement insurance, developing data analysis tools, as I was the only IT staff on site. As a result, I gradually became a jack-of-all-trades: helpdesk, systems and network, and telecom administration. All of that in addition to my regular dev projects! After that, I moved on to system and network administrator positions, still working on dev, contributing to open source projects that I used to make my own improvements.
After several years in the public sector, I needed a new challenge. And that's how I ended up at the Global Operations Center of Savencia, an international food group, as part of the observability team, where I began my journey with Dynatrace.
Our job is a mix of operations and project tasks. We design and implement observability strategies according to projects or incidents, manage the platform, help and train people to use it, and develop our own extensions when necessary.
How does Dynatrace fit into the picture, and what was the biggest challenge Dynatrace helped you overcome?
I like to understand how things work and especially why they don't work as expected, so observability and Dynatrace are a perfect match. Our team is fairly new, and we're on the way to adopting Dynatrace on a wider scale. So my role is to be an expert on this tool and an observability advocate, helping to go further in what we can do with our tools. For the moment, the biggest challenge is the development of an app, which is underway and which will allow us to facilitate the handling of interoperability incidents and reduce tool sprawl. We've already done a lot of work, and it's promising!
What makes the Dynatrace Community important to you?
When I joined Savencia, I had everything to learn about Dynatrace, and the Community has really been an essential resource. Often, I don't directly find the solution, but I always find the keys to tackling the problem differently and ultimately solving it. I think this place of sharing and mutual support is really priceless. Understanding and providing an answer to a question you haven't asked yourself yet is also a good challenge and another way of learning and progressing.
"It's extremely enriching to see that we all have different approaches to solving our problems, and to be able to exchange easily with experts willing to share their experience and give their sound advice. "
Tell us something about you that most people don’t know. What is your biggest joy or passion in life?
I have many hobbies and interests, from handiwork to astronomy, including gardening, cooking, and more. But the one I spend most time on is music. I started out as a teenager playing saxhorn (kind of euphonium) in my village band, then guitar in a rock band.
At that time, I was as much into sports as music, but at 20, I stopped doing sports competitions because of a serious car accident. From then on, I focused on music, and since then, I've been learning to play a new instrument on a regular basis. Now I mainly play the trombone, still a little guitar, but in addition to the saxhorn I also play drums, a little piano, ukulele, mandolin, charango, and, unlike @m3tomlins, also the banjo! And next on the list is the harmonica, and one day I hope to take up the cello!
This year I've been lucky enough to be taking part in a project involving over 200 musicians and 2 of France's finest jazzmen, Arnaud Dolmen and Robinson Khoury, we gave two amazing concerts a week ago in a great jazz festival.
I'm rather shy and reserved, so many people don't know much about me (well, much less so after this article), but I still keep a few things under wraps!
I've got a lot of things in the back of my mind, but I also like surprises, so I don't really have anything planned. On the list is certainly to return to the Seychelles with my children. We did our honeymoon there and discovered such a marvelous place, and above all, met so many wonderful people that I'd love my children to be able to experience it too.
Again, the list of dreams would be long, but if there were only one, it would be to be on stage for a funky jam session with the Red Hot Chili Peppers!
What achievement are you most proud of?
I can't think of a single achievement; that's not how I live things. It's more like a whole, a journey on a tormented river where I don't look back! It's a long way to the top if you wanna to rock'n'roll. 🤘
In my daily life, what I'm proud of are my 3 children, watching them grow up, sharing as much as possible with them. I'm always in constant admiration of how resilient, curious, inexhaustible, and open-minded they are. They're my best source of questioning and inspiration!
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