About Nico
This page tells you a few things about me - I'll try to update it from time to time.
Although most of this blog is in English, being French I do write from time to time en Français, mostly when discussing French books/comic strips, or discussing "national" (as in: more local) topics.
Centers of interest
As you can probably tell from the top of that page, I am heavily into (Trail) Running, Sailfish OS, and more rarely these days Pine64's PineTime smartwatch.
- Running: I have been running for 10 years, starting with road runing, and I moved to Trail running in 2021, and have not looked back since then.
In 2024, I completed my first Ultra trail race (Ultra Trail du Saint Jacques), and am preparing for the CCC (Courmayeur - Champex - Chamonix), UTMB's little sister. - Sailfish OS and FreeBSD (and more generally Open Source): I have been using Open Source since 1998, FreeBSD since 2000, and Sailfish OS since 2013.
This blog is written from a laptop running FreeBSD, hosted on an Apache server running on a FreeBSD server, and whenever you're sending me an email, it's handled by Postfix and Dovecot, running on an OpenBSD server, which I read using Mutt. I wrote a bunch of articles about how I used FreeBSD. - Retrocomputing (especially Amstrad CPC): The CPC is the first computer I used and owned, back in 1988. I spent countless hours on it, programming in BASIC and playing games. I also had friends who owned Atari ST 520 and Amiga 1200, so those are also machines I do enjoy - but my heart is still very much with the CPC.
You can checkout my retrocomputing articles here. - Books: I read books and comic strips (albeit not as often as I wished), both in English and French - and I like summing up what I liked, or didn't like. I'm doing so because I found out about a lot of books thanks to people who shared their readings, so I'm doing the same, hoping it's helpful.
Professional Life
I don't want this page to turn into a LinkedIn profile, but in a nutshell:
these days, I am a Product Manager at F5, an American company specialising in Security.
Volterra, the company I was with before, got bought by F5 in 2021, and with that I moved to Product.
Before that, I spent 15 years as a Sales Engineer/Presales in DNS / DDI (DNS/DHCP/IPAM), working at PowerDNS and EfficientIP.
I like considering myself as a cat, having lived different lives: prior to my IT career, I studied Sales (yeah!) and before that, I attended a nursing school for 2 years.
Personal Life
I am married and have 2 boys, and we live near Angers, France - which, as I like to describe it to non-French people, is a city in-between Le Mans and Nantes.