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LaurentBossavitBackStory

Born in Paris, 1970, to middle-class scientist parents.

As far back as I remember, I was the kind of kid teachers pigeonhole as "bright but lazy", perpetually being told to "work harder".

The early memories which matter, for what I'm trying to say here, are of toys; all Christmas presents, I believe:

• Merlin (I must have been 8 or 9)
• Big Trak : http://www.inthe80s.com/toys/bigtrak.shtml
• Floppy Jump : http://www.miniarcade.com/bandai/floppy.htm

I was hooked from an early age on things which bleeped and blooped, which did more than one thing, and which you had to figure out how they worked - which was the whole point and all the fun of it.

Then came computers, which were the same, only totally different - to my favorite toys as a grown-up's book to picture books. In order of appearance, they were a ZX-81, an Apple II, and a Mac Plus, which came along just before I was old enough to vote. I'd been fascinated with arcade games but not allowed to play them - the ZX was a thing of magic. Less than half an hour of fussing with the old cassette player and tape which were the only way of preserving the BASIC code I had laboriously entered into is ridiculously small memory, and here was Space Invaders right here in my parents' living room.

Seven years of PEEKing and POKEing later, there is no question that my career is going to involve computers. I have also decided that I will be a writer. (I'm not actually writing, mind you. There have been attempts, but no more.) I am toying with the idea of somehow combining the two. In the end, my hazy career plans give way to my parents' precise and practical schedule for getting me a good education, and I enrol in something which would have gotten me (at least) a nice engineering degree if I'd stuck with it.

Instead, I jumped out of that track at 21 or so to become a software professional. My first job was as a freelance developer, doing a porting job on a game originally developed for Atari, to my beloved Apple Mac. This failed miserably to be the start of a successful career as an independent game author, so I took something which could pass for a real job instead.

I was hired, at a small business which peddled a "diskmagazine" and other cheap software, primarily for my linguistic skills. Initially I translated the dust jacket copy of cheap bundle-deal game packages. Then I graduated to handling actual software, translating all screen-visible text so that a US-developed home accounting app, Word clone or Tetris clone could be republished as an all-French home accounting app, Word clone or Tetris clone. This often involved making small modifications to the apps, so I became a software maintainer. My small modifications occasionally revealed mistakes in the original code, or mistakes in my understanding of it, which resulted in "bugs". Our customers didn't like these, so - we were a small business - I also became a software tester and debugger.

Eventually I finally became a developer again, and while the business was still small it was expanding, so I became an (occasional) manager of developers as well. There was nobody else to ask, so I was the one asked for estimates and plans. I still remember the first three-month project I managed which turned into a one-year project. I became a developer again. Then later I was blessed once more with the title of "manager". Eventually I became used to the cycle, and to projects being late, and to always being the person who absolutely had to stick around nights and week-ends so we could make the absolutely final deadline (or maybe the next absolutely final deadline).

Meanwhile I was still in love with technology. By 1995 my ad hoc R&D had managed to transform the small diskmagazine business into a small but VC-funded (and still expanding) multimedia CD-ROM business. I was CTO and one of five shareholders, not counting the VCs. The Internet was coming of age, and the rush of discovery hit me all over again: here was a new toy that promised years and years of happy play. I tried to convince my associates that another transformation was due, failed, tried to pursue the projects on my own, failed, took another almost-real job again, as a developer. Instead of working nights and week-ends to save another late project I worked nights and week-ends to make my vision of Internet applications a reality.

I guess I'm a slow learner. CTO again as my "vision" attracted an entrepreneur from the US, back to developer again when that company failed to take off after two years - it took me yet another cycle before I started questioning whether late projects, working at night, and being blamed for bad projects, were all really necessary parts of working with software and cool technology. Started to realize that the ways of coping I had developed were at best stopgap measures.

All this time I'd kept up a habit of reading up on new stuff more or less permanently. Initially at the library, then via the Internet. In 2000 I had been reading up on automated regression test suites, which sounded like something I should be doing, when I came across ExtremeProgramming on the C2 Wiki. Somewhere in there was an assertion which captured my interest: "Don't work more than 40 hours a week". That too sounded like something I should think about. I started learning again, this time about an entirely different kind of technology. I was enchanted with Kent Beck's Extreme Programming Explained, and for the next couple years my reading consisted mostly of books referenced in that book's bibliography, including a number of books by JerryWeinberg.

One fateful day in 2002, I made a comment on the ExtremeProgramming mailing list - I don't remember what it was about - and KeithRay responded with something like, "You ought to check out the SHAPE forum if you're interested in that kind of thing." I did just that, found out about AYE as well. I missed AYE 2002 (that's another story), and am very much looking forward to AYE 2003 after over fifteen months of waiting.

LaurentBossavit 2003.10.23