From Burn-Out to International Speaker: 2023 teached me these 5 dummy but important lessons
I see a lot of posts and articles from people I admire about “2023 retrospective”, and as I have some time in a train, I take advantage of it to share it: it starts badly and ends well, so if you are in a not ideal place (our work is to sit in front of a computer but can be really hard), I hope my 2023 story can help convince you that there can be light at the end of the tunnel :)
Dear 2023, I started you by staying at home and off work for one month, after the second burn-out of my 23 years carreer, because when you spend your time wanting to prove everything to everyone and ignore signs from your body that tells you to sleep, it can not end well (youngsters be careful ! ^^)
But thanks to the great understanding of my coworkers at Cloudity, I came back with more sane habits, and focused on:
- My CTO job with Cloudity, but ONLY when my expertise was really required
- My MegaLinter maintainer job with OX Security, but ONLY when I had enough free time
- Other open-source activities, but ONLY when I had enough free time
The lesson I learned is that it’s a dead end to think that because our brain can work fast, we can focus on too many multiple projects at the same time, as being passionate about our work can be dangerous if there are no clear limits between professionnal and personal life.
This complicated time now being behind me, I was able to start what I think was the most productive year of all my carreer !
LESSON 1: Learn to detect when you’re going too far, and reduce your workload as soon as possible, before it’s too late.
After some time peacefully working on Cloudity projects, in february the great Vernon Keenan offered me to post on salesforcedevops.net and interviewed me in his podcast, giving more visibility to my pet project at Cloudity: sfdx-hardis for Salesforce CI/CD :)
It’s not a secret I’m crazy about open-source, and not so bad at advertising about it online… but I was scared to death to advertise about it in front of crowds during conferences, especially if I had to travel far away from home, because of severe anxiety issues (burn-outs leave traces ^^).
My friends Fabien & Fabrice already pushed me to be speaker at French Touch Dreamin’ 22, and as I felt better, and wanted sfdx-hardis to take off even more outside of Cloudity, I submitted a talk for Yeur Dreamin’ in Brussels (1h30 of train is not so far away from Paris), and hijacked my colleague Angélique to co-present it and prove that sfdx-hardis CI/CD can also be mastered by admin profiles.
The weeks to wait between being selected and attending the event were so long and stressful… but a little bit less when my pen-pal Pablo, that I had never met, announced me that he’ll take a plane from Ireland to support me !
The session was scheduled in the last slot of the day, and in the main room, so I had the full day to panic , smoking cigarette over cigarette… but thanks to the reassuring presence of Fabien, Fabrice, Pablo and Angélique (whose it was the first public talk!), I survived the day and we provided a session with good feedback despite the presence of my dear guinea pigs in the slides !
LESSON 2: Stop asking yourself if you are legit or not: When you studied your topic enough to want to share it during a conference: you are legit !
I don’t know if it’s related or not, but I caught the attention of the delightful Alba , who hooked me up with Josh Birk for his Salesforce Developers podcast , so June 2023 was the first appearance of sfdx-hardis in an official Salesforce media !
Boosted by this episode, I took one hour to submit my session to Dreamforce 23 Call For Speakers : San Francisco is way too far for my plane issues, but I care more about spreading the word about open-source than about myself, so if by miracle I’m selected I’ll ask my colleagues to present it !
Parallelly, MegaLinter was still growing, with more and more users from prestigious companies
I’ve been invited to be a speaker about it in two conferences during the summer:
- Refactor DX, in July in Toronto (CA), to speak about MegaLinter
- Black Hat USA, in August in Las Vegas (US), to present CodeTotal, a MegaLinter spin-off with nice UIs
I felt better but still wasn’t confident to travel so far (I am not comfortable in crowded spaces, like planes), so even if I would have loved to enjoy speaking in front of experts stronger than I’ll ever be, additionnally with plane tickets & hotels free of charge, I respectfully declined Ahmad and Eyal’s respective invitations, to spend my summer taking vacations with friends to only have fun and rest, and really disconnect from work :)
LESSON 3: Once you get better, don’t rush and take all the time you need to keep getting better !
After these well deserved vacations, by mid-august I received a shocking e-mail “Your Dreamforce Session has been accepted”
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A little bit disappointed to not feel confident enough to spend 11h in a plane, I activated my plan to request my great Cloudity colleagues Yosra & Jean-Pierre to handle the conference.
They resisted, not because they didn’t want to do it, but tried to convince me to handle the conference myself as I deserved it, but I remained stubborn: “Sorry I’m not sure I’ll be able to, so I prefer not to take the risk of drowning into a panick attack” , so they finally accepted.
Then I received another mail from Andres: “Hi Nicolas, my session about SF CLI Plugins has been accepted, would you like to be co-speaker with Shane and me ?”
Arghhhhh two sessions at Dreamforce, who the f* was I to let some fears prevent me from doing what I’d love to do ?
I hesitated for a few days, then finally accepted it, and I did not regret it.
Surrounded by my Cloudity colleagues, Dreamforce week was a blast and I’ve attended to numerous amazing presentations, met many of the great experts I was chatting with for years, met again Pablo, and came back with many ideas about how to make some things in Cloudity even greater than they already were :)
LESSON 4: If you really want to do it, stop hesitating and just do it !
As I’ve been selected for Dreamforce, why not trying French Touch Dreamin ’23 ?
- Aim for Flow Excellence with the Lightning Flow Scanner, with Fabian anf for Ruben who couldn’t attend
- Automate the monitoring of your Salesforce org with open-source only, with my colleague Maxime , who was a first time speaker
And let’s go for another great day with the trailblazer community !
I also performed my first presentation outside of the Salesforce ecosystem, following an article I wrote for Programmez Magazine, and have already been invited to animate a workshop about MegaLinter by starinux association members that were in the room.
During this year, I also had a big GitHub activity, and have been lucky to share the workload on open-source projects with Cloudity members, and amazing people I’ve never met but can’t live without!
- Clément, Maxime, Dimitri , Mickael & more from Cloudity, + Roman , Leo and more from outside of Cloudity , on sfdx-hardis
- Edouard, Kurt & Borja on MegaLinter
- Steven on npm-groovy-lint & vscode-groovy-lint
- So many that I can’t all quote them here but you can see all there contriobutions on the repositories insights :)
LESSON 5: Never forget to share the success if you shared the workload, and bring them on stages with you !
Conclusion
2023 started really bad, but with better habits and great entourage, it has been a great year, and 2024 is about to start brightly !
I wouldn’t have dreamed this year to interact with so much great content, events and people, so thanks everyone that helped to make that possible !
This article is probably not completed and I’ll change many things later, but it’s time to spend the new year’s eve party with friends, so… let’s remember lesson 1 and see you later !
