Manfred Touron

42 🎓

Tuition-free coding school in Paris & Silicon Valley

10 pages about "42 🎓"

Jury @ hackathon noc42 - pimp my school

noc.42.fr will be the new buildings around the 42 school in Paris that will complete the offer from the school with beds and other living services to make 42 more like a campus.

As opposite to most school campuses, this one will be located in multiple areas of the same block; some services will be available to neighbors (non-students); NOC is for « not a campus »

The theme of the hackathon was to hack this project while it’s still a project on paper and while it’s still possible to challenge and adapt some architectural choices.

The rule was to propose a project that preserve or enforce the culture of 42 (encourage collaboration between students and neighbors, improve the ecology score, provide new services to students, help local NGOs, using the technology)


Some of the projects:

  • a local coin that allows to gain coins by helping partners (help partner NGO, help the school) — very nice project, sadly not using a blockchain
  • an IOT platform to automate every part of the new buildings, and available to all students
  • an app that help people to find teammates to share a lunch, a.k.a. « Peer-Cooking », this project allows students to eat healthy for a lower price, to meet new students for a nice moment; this project is also a solution to allow more people to cook with less kitchen area, less energy consuming, etc
  • a wiki, some rules to constitute a community, and a system of flight cases with theme-specific tools inside. This modular system allows to create workshops on-the-fly for students, neighbors, NGOs, and other schools; with an optimized storing system and cost optimizations by increasing the sharing rate
  • and a lot of other IOTs or apps projects that were focused on addressing a specific topic

QOTD: « I’m convinced that a lot of new paradigms, new ecosystems, and new technologies will be bring to the public thanks to the artists and to the art in general », @zooma, speaking about the blockchain

10 Minutes to get a job - mindmap-based live presentation 🕙

10 minutes to get a job, by 42

42 recently launched a series of conferences named “10 Minutes to get a job”, the title is a little bit counter-intuitive, because, the 10 minutes hard-limit is for the organization presenting its activities; the students have all the time they need after the presentations, with some fresh foods and drinks.

10 minutes to get a job, by 42born2code

This series of conferences is very successful, a lot of students looking for a job (or just curious) are coming in the room for the presentation, and a lot more are coming for the buffet after (not sure about the motivation for these ones). 😄

Berty’s first public presentation

It was something totally new for the Berty team, the first time we talk about the project publicly, and as the project is still under development, we selected pieces of information that can be shared and that are is relevant and “sexy” for the students.

With the constraints of “10 minutes”, we made the choice of using preparing a mind-map with facts, no phrases, no images, and then I made the presentation by going word by word, and by expanding each mind-map folder’s.

It’s a little bit more complicated than a more standard conference, as I have to concurrently speak at the microphone, read the slide, move the zoomed map, expand folders, and everything in less than 10 minutes. Luckily, I made it in 9:55s and the organizer allowed one question from the audience.

The setup behind Berty's mindmap-based presentation

The cool thing about this mind-map based conference is that at the end, there is only one slide, containing all the pieces of information and that everyone physically (and intellectually) present at that time should be able to explain again.

One slide is practical to capture with a smartphone, and this slide contains everything; this advantage is really cool and I think that I will use this technique again when I don’t need to focus on a specific topic.

Berty's mind-map based presentation

Improvements

I was very concentrated with the data that I totally forgot a lot of details :)

Personal notes for later:

  • Put at least my name, somewhere on the slide :)
  • Say who I am when I start talking
  • Don’t forget to add contact instructions

The buffet

I met 15 students, and my colleagues, Alex and Gody also met additional ones.

I was really happy to receive feedbacks from the students about the effectiveness of this style of presentation.

It was straight to the point, I like it

or

It was intense, I received a lot of motivational information, I want to know more now

My colleagues told me that a student asked her:

How are you so much energized, it’s impressive to feel so much energy

After the event

I made a lot of mistakes during the presentation and the preparation, but we also made some after :)

First, we forgot to create a job’s specific email address, it was fastly fixed, and the dedicated address (42@berty.tech) was shared to the students by the 42 staff (thank you Virginie!).

Why we attended this event?

Technically, we are not in the hurry of hiring anyone, but Alex and I, recently finished to read “Who”, and we decided to follow the concept of meeting people continuously, maintain a list of people with their talents, and contact them the day we are in the hurry of hiring someone.


Who: The A Method for Hiring

Geoff Smart, Randy Street


Additionally, we are also open to “the perfect match”, and last but not least, I’m often solicited by other friends and CEOs of the startups I audit, so it’s always useful to take some time to meet motivated students, speak with them,

Berty’s scorecards

Even if we are not actively looking for a position, we made the exercise of defining what kind of profile would make the difference enough to hire someone right now.

We formatted our job offers as “Scorecards”, which is the method suggested in “Who”.

See Berty’s Scorecards (work-in-progress).

Unveiling Berty to a small group of students at 42 school in Paris

A lot of very positive feedbacks and interesting questions :)

Looking forward to organise an hackathon with them

$> man fred - fred man page

Image made with Carbon

A good friend is starting his “piscine” at 42 today; it’s only his first day but he already made me the good old joke about “there is no man fred”.

If this joke doesn’t make you smile, this is probably because you don’t know what is the man command for developers and how much useful it is.

Explanation: man is the short for manual, when you type man something in a terminal, you can get some information about the command/function/thing.

More info on Wikipedia: man page, RTFM (read the fucking manual)

Unfortunately, as the fred command does not exist by default, running man fred will just raise an error:

$ man fred
No manual entry for fred

As a workaround, I created a manpage for fred four years ago. Today, I just added some install instructions and an example in the README file.

As soon as you install this manpage on your computer, you will be able to type man fred and have usefulvital! information about me :)

Good luck William for your piscine!