This is a submission for the 2025 New Year Writing challenge: Retro’ing and Debugging 2024.
🤗 About
2024 was an incredible year filled with challenges, achievements, and an abundance of - sometimes unexpected - learning opportunities that came to me on my way.
Reflecting on the year, here are some of the highlights that shaped my growth as a professional and as a person.
What I enjoyed the most this year is the fact that I could transform real life problems into nicely well packaged IT projects that could satisfy my own curiosity and then be shared with the community.
🪄 My very own secret sauce
If I had to resume my secret sauce for creativity, it would be as soon as I see something that triggers my curiosity - which is at the very core of my learning journey - :
"What if I... What may happen if..."
⛩️ My pillars
Below the pillars that helped me to stay on track and to deliver projects that I enjoyed work on:
- 🥋 Code of conduct : the discipline and rules I created & refined for myself to stay on track, with the help for example of books
- 📚 Books : which inspired me for management and tech and "forced" me to focus on some key points during important periods of time
- 🤗 Achievements : where I could unleash my creativity and learn new things on the learning journey while discovering new technologies and techniques on my way
- 🏆 Challenges : that gave the pace to deliver creations according to strict deadlines to various platforms
🎯 Achievements
🍴 Real-Life Restaurant Waiter on HuggingChat
One of the most exciting experiments this year involved developing a HuggingChat-based real working chatbot that mimicked the role of a restaurant waiter. Using real data that I scraped and delivered as a CSV file on GitHub, this chatbot, powered by LLama3.3, showcased how generative AI can leverage actual datasets to provide human-like interaction and transform service industries. Additionally, this chatbot can be used by voice on mobile devices, making it even more accessible and versatile. The data is always up-to-date and supports multiple languages, which is a key point for a restaurant setting.
This project brought a human-like interaction to AI and showcased how generative AI can transform service industries.
📢 First Real-Life Agentic Experimentations
Taking AI beyond the virtual space, I dived into agentic AI—deploying real-world tasks like sending SMS messages. I made OpenInterpreter learn by itself how to use and call my own programs, enabling it to send SMS messages from and to New Caledonia. It was thrilling to see AI actively participating in tangible workflows.
🌐 NODES24
For the third year in row, I submitted a paper to Neo4J NODES events! This year's project became a nexus for integrating multiple technologies: APIs, GitHub, Continuous Integration, Contenerization, generative AI, Google Apigee, Python, and agentic AI.
It felt like building a living efficient ecosystem of tools working in harmony, a real DEVOPS teamwork!
At the end we delivered a first running prototype based on Gemini which was incredibly powerful. We should deploy it in production within the first three months of 2025.
🔌 IoT Advancements & disruption
I've always been a big fan of hackster.io projects. So I bought myself a LED Matrix... telling myself that I would do something creative later.
Well 2024 was the year ! With the help of students we built a very cool and original operational prototype that displays live wait time in Post-Offices!
📊 Kaggle journey
I contributed many datasets and Notebooks... and even became a "Notebooks Expert". Now I use them as an essential part of my Data Storytellings.
🧠 Copilot Prototypes
Developing prototypes with GitHub Copilot for real-world challenges—from optimizing workflows to solving niche problems—was immensely satisfying. Copilot felt like an extension of creativity itself. For example help find a job and produce a professional nice looking letter to apply.
🔎 OSINT Initiatives
I gave a first try to Open Source Intelligence (OSINT) with a real life datasets. I'm especially satisifed to have been able to two distinct datasets thanks to Ollama and structured LLM outputs.
Thanks to that I could produce a new dataset, new intelligence and even produce a very efficient LLM benchmark of Open Source LLMs.. This field underscored the importance of ethical considerations in technology... and of course of how any kind of data can lead to new levels of intelligence.
🌊 Pacific Dataviz Challenge
For the third year in row, I participated to the Pacific Dataviz Challenge which combines storytelling with data visualization. This year, I applied in two categories :
- Static
- Dynamic with a video
I focused on a very serious topic which is : violence on kids in New-Caledonia...which was a hard topic. I shared the whole dataprep pipeline on Kaggle and Gephi dataviz so anyone could reuse them.
📚 Books
This year, I immersed myself in several impactful books that shaped my thinking and approach to challenges. Some highlights include:
Reading these works not only provided valuable insights but also served as a reminder that personal and professional growth often starts with the knowledge we seek out.
- The Geek Way: The Radical Mindset that Drives Extraordinary Results
- Permanent Record - Edward Snowden
- Metadata Matters - John Horodyski
- The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology - Ray Kurzweil
🏆 Challenges
Maths Curiosity
Rediscovering the beauty of mathematics became both a challenge and a joy. Tackling complex problems reminded me that persistence pays off and that curiosity is a skill worth nurturing.
Ideation Automation
Developing systems to automate ideation processes pushed me to think outside the box. While the automation itself was successful, the real challenge lay in ensuring the ideas were contextually relevant.
Personal Hackathon ( Go from scratch in one week-end)
As I always really enjoy a lot using cool cli applications, it was a long time since I wonder if I could find time to give it a try on a week-end. Therefore I created myself personal hackathon to learn Go and integrate SMS functionality was both exhilarating and daunting.
The steep learning curve of Go programming tested my resilience but ultimately expanded my technical repertoire. What I love the most were the tools around Go and of course its packaging system which is amazing.
I really loved that experimentation which inspired me some works for 2025.
Mentorship and Collaboration
This year I had the chance to get:
- Two Open Innovation projects with youg students of UNC (University of New-Caledonia)
- One intern to benchmark how complex our stack is to handle for a junior developper. my goal is to enhance programmers onboarding and make it more efficient.
Social platforms
Reached:
- 24 K followers on DEV.to
- Finally hit 80 subscribers on my DevOPS LABS/
@devopslabs2812YT Channel
🥋 Code of conduct
- Stay curious about what other people are doing and building around you
- Stay hungry to build new things that bring you joy... and achieve them at a regular pace
- Write blog posts and make videos to sharpen storyteller skills
- Integrity: don't do things just to get likes on social networks, but just because you want your idea come to life
- Imagine new projects regardless of your current knowledge limits
- Integrate Thoughtfully: Bridging multiple technologies requires a clear vision of how they interact.
- Use tech to make good : put priority to projects that can help people
- Collaborate Openly: Teamwork, especially with young minds, fosters innovation and mutual growth.
At last, have fun and build your own culture. In my case, I've created and share some video memes for french people :
💭 Last words
While looking back at 2024, I realize that it was a year of boundless creativity and learning, I had hard time to select the most representative achievements in this post.
👉 It reminded me that technology is not just about solving problems but also about imagining new possibilities....and most importantly, thinking out of the box.
Equally, it underscored the importance of teamwork, leadership, and continuous innovation—key pillars that drive meaningful progress in both personal and professional spheres.
Now, let's enjoy a summer break to have an even more innovative 2025!
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