Who I am
I’m Alex (they/them, he/him if you struggle), and I’m from Grenoble, France. I spent part of my childhood in Québec, then came back to Grenoble at age 9. Already at that point, I loved languages, and soon entered a bilingual high school where some classes were taught in English. After that, I dabbled in economics, hated it and switched to French, English, Italian and German translation studies (LEA bachelor’s degree), soon specializing in marketing. I then studied marketing at the graduate level at emlyon business school.
After graduating, I left for Ireland, where I helped client companies set up their marketing workflows over their first 3 months with HubSpot. I then became the Content Marketing Manager at JobTeaser, and finally got a chance to come back to my early love of languages, joining the Localization team at Meta.
Six years later, I joined Hyli! At Hyli, I’m the main person responsible for documentation and any kind of content that’s on the more technical side. I also work on developer enablement and ecosystem growth: everything from testnet copy to the founder podcast to Telegram community moderation and developer support.
Work style
Organisation
My overarching philosophy is based on the Pareto principle: 20% of the effort yields 80% of the result. If you want me to give you the final 20%, you’re going to have to convince me that it’s really worth it!
Very clear tracking is important to me. I use Obsidian for my own stuff, but will do my best to use other tools, like Notion. To-do lists and clearly assigned tasks are the only way to get me to do something. I will take lots of meeting notes because otherwise I forget everything. I try not to use Google Docs much because they get really messy, but it’s often inevitable and that’s fine. Anything that can be put on a wiki should be on a wiki (Notion qualifies as a wiki).
I get anxious when tasks float around in Slack without clear ownership. I need assignees, deadlines, and a clear goal. Vague ideas will make it into my backlog, but probably will never be prioritized.
I appreciate clear and direct feedback. If you give me a vague suggestion, I won’t know what to do with it and probably will ignore it. Feedback is best when given in writing.
Communications
When I’m available, I do my best to answer messages as soon as I can. If I don’t reply within 24 hours, I got overwhelmed and probably forgot: feel free to send me a reminder. I mute Slack threads liberally, so feel free to tag me again.
I get most work done in the morning and favour afternoon meetings, when my brain is a bit too fried to create anything and talking to people is nicer.
If there’s nothing in my calendar, I’m probably free, but I do not do well in meetings, so let’s talk asynchronously whenever possible. Many questions can be solved more easily with a quick call than a long message exchange: you can call me anytime! I try to avoid group meetings as much as I can. I wrote a whole essay about the numerous issues of video calls.
I try to give too much information rather than not enough. That sometimes turns into long messages when I want to be thorough. I don’t expect you to be as verbose!
I also tend to be a bit too negative. It’s not that I don’t like you, it’s just how I talk! I’m really working on it, but if I’m tired or taken by surprise, I might be a bit more dry than I want to be.
Consistency
My productivity works as a cycle.
If I’m in a low-energy moment, I will deprioritize some things, so let me insist on my previous point: priorities, deadlines, and assignees are very important.
If I’m in a high-energy moment, I’ll clear the backlog all at once and it will feel magical.
Team dynamics
Behaviours
The more people involved in a discussion, the more I get confused and tend to lose my focus and give up on the meeting.
I tend to compensate for my lack of listening skills by talking a lot and trying to lead the conversation – please stop me when I take up too much space! I’ll never take a « let me finish » negatively and I expect to also be cut off. I’m working on this, but need to improve a lot still.
Interests
I enjoy reading and will read any book or article you send my way. Everything.
My interests include sociology (I actually got a bachelor’s degree in sociology just for fun), editing Wikipedia, music (I used to play the piano and the saxophone, but am completely useless now; however, I’m a solid shower singer), and writing about things I’m interested in, usually on my blog (and usually in French).
And I’m a big Winter Olympics enthusiast!
That’s it for now – I’ll update this as I continue my career, and hope it will be of use to some of you!