My name is Théo, I’m a 36 years old french polymath · nerd · engineer · photographer · musician · poet and probably a couple of other things. I’ve been living in Berlin for the past ten years but still only speak an embarrassingly somewhat decent German.

You can address me in English of course, German, or French, whichever you’re the most comfortable with. If you’re feeling adventurous though: you could give a shot at Spanish, Portuguese, or even Japanese; who knows what might happen.

Background

I come from a rather small town in Paris’ western suburbs. Initially I studied Literature and Philosophy and was set out to become a teacher, journalist, or, who knows, a philosopher?

As a 90s kid, computers and electronics were somewhat always in my environment, but I really never was that much interested in how they worked. Until someday, some friend introduced me to programming with Python, and helped me install Mandriva Linux on my parents’ computer. A few years later, I decided to interrupt my studies, so that I could go back to high-school (from home) and get my “scientific Baccalaureate”. From there I went to a computer-science oriented engineering school, where I had one of the best and most stimulating experiences of my life.

I never looked away since (although I’ve been looking into studying Psychology and Linguistics at a “night school” recently). It’s been 13+ years, I work in Software Engineering; and I have no regrets whatsoever. This job provides me a lot of the things I need to live a happy life: problems to solve, new things to learn all the time, a connection to a wide-variety of new topics to explore.

Personality

It might not seem like it at first, but I’m actually a rather shy and introverted person. The Myers and Briggs’ personality test classifies me as an INTP, and in my experience it fits both how I perceive myself and what others reflect to me: give it a read.

Another constitutive aspect of my personality I prefer to share is that I’m a person with a high IQ (for some reason I always feel guilty, ashamed and scared of saying it). I’m not Einstein, but in my experience, and according to psychology research, my brain can work in a somewhat different way than the typical person. Sharing it helps me to feel more comfortable. For instance, although it tends to not be very well accepted in the world of technology I’m a person who has and relies on intuition quite heavily (as opposed to complex, argumented reasoning; although I’m also capable of that). A lot of my awoken time is spent learning things, my brain somehow smooches all that in dark and tiny corners, and fetches them out of the blue without necessarily providing me context when it judges it necessarily. Also, I can have trouble reasoning sequentially; my brain tends to prefer a more tree-like reasoning structure where ideas are nodes, and it constantly tries to connect them with edges in ways that can sometimes look completely irrelevant. Thus, I also sometimes have a hard time expressing what I mean, because it’s really hard to make what in my brain is some sort of mind-map into a sequence of words.

Most importantly, I would describe myself as a compassionate, hypersensitive, but at the same time a very rational, logical, and dead-cold pragmatic person. You can expect kindness, compassion, but also absolute honesty (also intellectual) from me. I always have good intentions, tend to over-communicate and tend to prefer direct communication.

Some of my biggest intellectual influences are Montaigne, Feynman, Nietzsche and Hobbes.

Hobb(i)es

When I’m in front an of screen 🧛

Playing video-games:

I get obsessed with management and automation games such as Factorio, Satisfactory, City Skylines or Capitalism II.

Simulation games such as Flight Simulator, Assetto Corsa, or Dirt Rally stimulate my brain as well my love for processes, protocols and the quest of perfection.

Talking about perfection, I tend to become quite obsessive on games that require either flow state, absolute concentration or motor skills such as Celeste, Hotline Miami, or Super Meat Boy.

Coding things… lots of things! Hacking and programming are my passions. If Mark Twain is to be trusted, I’ve never worked a single day in my life. My Github is full of some of my creations and experiments. Some others are buried deep into encrypted drives in my computer; and won’t see the light of day until I spend more time on them.

I also build video-games using the Unreal Engine here and there, but have yet to bring one to a state that’s good enough to be released…

When I’m not in front of a screen 🌞

I love climbing, swimming and hiking. COVID made it harder, but whenever I can I like to hop on a flight/train/boat to who knows where and visit some place new.

I have a healthy obsession for Japan, and fly there as often as I can. It’s truly one of the few places in the world where I truly feel comfortable at. People are extremely sensitive, polite, everything always works, food is extraordinary, the culture and landscapes are stunning…

Podcasts occupy my ears most of the days. Generally I prefer those that are very specialized in something I know nothing about.

After spending 3/4 years of my life reading almost a book a day; I must say I got a bit tired of it. The only books I open nowadays are now scientific/technical. However Science fiction is the only fictional kind I can still read with pleasure; it allows me to escape both the routine of the modern life, and the globally depressing state of the world.

Around the Internets 🌍

Writing and publishing some code on Github

Exhibiting my skills and achievements on LinkedIn

Answering your Go, Python, Rust and Systems questions on Stack Overflow.

Fun Facts ⚡

I’ve lived a non neglectable part of my life on a houseboat. My parents still do.
I use the fish shell. Some people seem to find it funny.
I have a custom program running on one of my Raspberry Pi home servers observing the /proc/mounts file and re-mounting manually an external USB drive as soon as it’s unmounted. This has to do with some USB related weirdness on the Raspberry Pi side that leads to an external USB hard drive to somewhat block the system from booting if you add it to the /etc/fstab. If you have ideas, or a nicer solution for me, SEND HELP 🙇‍♂️
I often get asked where my Nickname “Oléiade” comes from. It’s from the Aeneid. A classical text by Virgil, a Roman poet, who tells the story of how Troy was conquered. In my memories, Oléiade was one of Ajax’ companions.

Contact me

Shoot me an email at “theo at crevon period me”, contact me on LinkedIn or come hangout on Github. Whatever you’re the most comfortable with. If you’re located in Berlin, we can also do this the old fashion way and go grab a coffee together.

Social were not good for me. They’re probably not good for you either. I left them years ago, invest those precious minutes looking for my profiles out there into something that’s meaningful to you instead; my treat.