Not a Number

Evaluating Den - A Dendritic Configuration Framework

Fri, 10 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I am currently rewriting again my infrastructure repository, now renamed drupol/infra, and documenting the work on an ongoing draft pull request: #124.

After my previous rewrite based on a feature-first mindset, I wanted to push the architectural concept further using vic/den, a Nix framework built around aspects, context transformations and dendritic pattern.

The short version: Den is impressive, genuinely powerful, and intellectually satisfying. However, while experimenting with it in a real infrastructure, I ran into an architectural constraint that feels deeper than any specific framework.

Refactoring My Infrastructure As Code Configurations

Thu, 01 May 2025 00:00:00 +0000

The drupol/nixos-x260 repository began as a simple and practical way to manage the configuration of my Lenovo ThinkPad X260 laptop, hence the (bad) name. Unsurprisingly, I quickly became hooked on the NixOS Linux distribution, and before long, I was running it on every machine I owned… first at home, then even at work (shhht!). As the obsession grew, so did the project. It naturally expanded to support a wide variety of systems: from a simple Intel-based laptop, to a Raspberry Pi router tucked away in the basement, and even an old iMac from 2012. Each machine came with its own quirks and specific requirements. Like many personal setups, what started as a clean and elegant solution gradually evolved into a tangled web of host-specific hacks and duplicated logic.

Retrospective 2024

Tue, 11 Feb 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Last year was quite something, I went through a lot, both personally and professionally.

To begin with, the first six months of 2024 were intense: juggling work, school, and writing my thesis simultaneously.

In June, my 3-year journey at the university came to a successful end. With my Master’s degree in Computer Science finally in hand and one fewer frustration, I defended my thesis on the 12th June 2024, and shortly afterwards, I made the full source available (on GitHub, on Codeberg). Since then, it has received several minor contributions from the community, which is great to see. The best highlight? I was invited to deliver both theoretical and practical sessions for students, focusing on software deployment and, of course, reproducibility. That marked the beginning of my formal collaboration with the university as a scientific volunteer in the Software Engineering team, something I am particularly proud of.

Understanding Kolmogorov Complexity

Thu, 18 Jan 2024 00:00:00 +0000

I often advocate for a straightforward yet effective rule: the shortest solution that delivers the desired result is usually the best. This approach, favoring concise algorithms, not only ensures efficiency but also reduces maintenance cost and bug susceptibility. Intriguingly, this practical principle finds its theoretical counterpart in data compression algorithm, data analysis and machine learning through the Minimum Description Length (MDL) and the Kolmogorov Complexity. These concepts delve deep into the essence of data representation and algorithmic efficiency.

Retrospective 2023

Sat, 23 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0000

It’s been a while since I last took the time to write here. 2023 has proven to be a particularly interesting year, filled with numerous projects and a wealth of learning opportunities. Throughout the year, I’ve contributed to 38 open-source projects, resulting in 357 merged pull requests.

statistics made using oss-contribs

Happy new year!

Sat, 01 Jan 2022 00:00:00 +0000

2022 has just started and I’ll take the opportunity to summarize what happened in 2021.

I will use different binoculars or point of view, here they are:

Open-source: Stuff related to open-source contributions
Work: Stuff related to work
Random: Stuff related to Nixos

This post might be a bit longer than usual, fear not and hang on tight!

Functional programming and PHP 8

Tue, 13 Jul 2021 00:00:00 +0000

PHP 8.0 has been released since half a year now and 8.1 is just around the corner.

My day to day version of PHP is 7.4 and I like it. It has very nice features and I really like the performance improvements that were made.

However, it’s a week now that I’m working on a project using PHP 8 and I started to use the new features.

AFUP interview

Wed, 07 Apr 2021 00:00:00 +0000

I will soon give a talk at AFUP regarding the loophp/collection library that I built.

I’ve been asked to make an interview and I had to reply to some questions.

This blog post is the english translation of this interview.

When we read "Lazy Collection", we think "Doctrine Collection". Could you tell us more why your library loophp/collection is different?

Prime numbers generation

Thu, 03 Sep 2020 00:00:00 +0000

It all started from a book

I was reading the Open Source book from Bartosz Milewski’s ‘Category Theory for Programmers’ when I saw something about Prime numbers:

A more interesting example is a coalgebra that produces a list of primes. The trick is to use an infinite list as a carrier. Our starting seed will be the list [2..]. The next seed will be the tail of this list with all multiples of 2 removed. It’s a list of odd numbers starting with 3. In the next step, we’ll take the tail of this list and remove all multiples of 3, and so on. You might recognize the makings of the sieve of Eratosthenes.

Lazy collection oddities

Mon, 10 Aug 2020 00:00:00 +0000

A year ago, I started to write a lazy collection library for PHP.

I haven’t written a specific article about it despite the fact that I would have wanted to, mostly by lack of time.

Almost a year ago and 318 commits later, I published the release 2.0.0 last week.

It all started a year ago, when I came across a pull request made against the Laravel framework.

Bookshelf

Wed, 08 Apr 2020 09:52:21 +0200

Projects

Wed, 08 Apr 2020 09:52:21 +0200

COVID19, teleworking and the other side of the coin

Mon, 06 Apr 2020 00:00:00 +0000

It’s been now more than two weeks that I’m teleworking… and I’m fine, really.

This blog post will explain how I live this situation and its outcome, according to me.

I’ve been begging for teleworking since I started working at European Commission. For some contractual reasons, it is not allowed for contractors. Europe is leading the trends on many things, but not on that subject sadly. Despite that, I’ve been loving my work very much. Working at the European Commission is great and so far it’s the best experience I ever had.

Summer vacations are over?

Mon, 09 Sep 2019 00:00:00 +0000

When I was a student, it was easy to remember when holidays were coming. Now that I’m working since more than a decade, it’s harder to remember and distinguish those period sometimes!

That said, I have to say that the pace at work is different and this is how I remember that I should take some days off.

Taskman, a friendly tasks runner

Sun, 21 Apr 2019 00:00:00 +0000

It’s been 2 months now that I left aside my regular work with Drupal 8 and switched back to Atomium development for Drupal 7.

I will soon publish another post on all the new stuff that has been made there, but for now, I will focus on a side project I’ve been doing.

First EU-FOSSA Hackathon about security, PHP, Symfony and API Platform

Sun, 07 Apr 2019 00:00:00 +0000

During the first weekend of April 2019, a hackathon was held in Silverquare Triomphe venue in Brussels.

The organizer, the European Commission, and a community of carefully selected developers participated to a hackathon in an amazing place.

The goal of having such an amount of skills contained in one single place, is to participate to the EU-FOSSA hackathon that the European Commission organised and funded.

PHP, composition and inheritance

Thu, 21 Feb 2019 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve been contributing to a couple of trending php libraries recently and during the analysis and the making of the patches, noticed that many libraries were using PHP not in the way I was used to.

Many of those libraries are having ‘final’ classes.

Why using final classes everywhere, what is the advantage?
As I’m not using final classes in my own projects, am I wrong since the beginning?

This article will try to bring an explanation to this.

PHPTree, a fast tree implementation

Thu, 27 Dec 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Hopefully for most of us, holidays are here. A special time for resting and enjoy quality time with the family, but also for thinking.

Even if I’m not attached to any religion, doing a Christmas tree is a kind of tradition… cats really loves it :-)

While decorating the tree, it got me thinking about tree based data structure. I used to play with trees into a previous project with Neo4J and I remember that I loved it.

How to use the PHP traits?

Tue, 30 Oct 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Recently, I’ve been busy rewriting small PHP libraries like ValueWrapper, HTMLTag, PHPNgrams, DynamicObjects, PHPartition, PHPermutations and Memoize.

I mostly rewrote them because of multiple things I wanted to do:

Use SOLID principle: The Single Responsibility Principle
Automatically generate and publish the library documentation using APIgen
Improve the tests quality by using PHP Infection
Improve the class hierarchy design when using a PHP trait and remove some limitations.

This article will explain what are traits and will try to propose, without pretension, a better way to write them.

How did I fall into Drupal

Sun, 15 Jul 2018 00:00:00 +0000

I started to use Drupal ~13 years ago. It was the end of life of version 4.5 at the time.

As I love photography, I first tried to use Drupal to publish my photos. I remember at the time, the struggle to integrate Gallery2 and Drupal… aaah time flies.

As always, I was motivated to learn it. The community was huge, active and responsive… and on the top of that, it’s a product out of my beloved country. To be honest, I gave up many times by lack of time, but also because my PHP knowledge was not really high. I felt that there was a great potential but I was frustrated to not be able to handle it properly.

Registry on steroids

Tue, 10 Jul 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Last year, I wrote with the help of my colleagues, a new theme for Drupal 7: Atomium.

That theme needed to break with the habits from the past and implements new concepts while giving more flexibility to the end-user. As those concepts were pretty new for most of the people using it, I’ve been asked to give training to some teams.

Numberphile and Neo4J numbers experimentations

Mon, 19 Feb 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Since the last post about Neo4J, I had to work on some project not involving it unfortunately.

However, being a regular user of Numberphile, I came across a specific video footage and I had the idea that we could find the solution to it using Neo4J.

In this video, Matt Parker discusses a puzzle problem involving square sums.

Discovering a new database: Neo4J

Mon, 01 Jan 2018 00:00:00 +0000

2018 is here. Happy new year !

2017 was a productive year in every direction. Workwise , it was a blast. I joined an amazing team and we are doing very nice things all together.

But my brain is constantly sparkling and I’ve got plenty of new ideas. During the last months, I’ve explored new universes. Symfony, NodeJS, Opendata, Telegram bot API, Twitter API… I’ve learned so much things in a so short time, it’s crazy how much behind we can be if we do not have side projects to let our creativity express itself. It’s now my job to try to push these new technologies and new tools at work, that is the most complicated part.

Playing with trains, Opendata, Symfony and NodeJS

Sun, 17 Dec 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Younger, working in Brussels was not an option.

I never had a deep love for that city, never had a deep love of traffic jam… and never had love for public transportation like trains.

Despite the fact that I love driving, I can’t bear staying in the car, stucked in the traffic jam, praying for the people in front of you to pass the next gear.

Reaching and overpassing the Drupal 7 limits

Fri, 10 Nov 2017 00:00:00 +0000

As I wrote in my previous post, the last months were pretty busy.

And it’s still the case.

I’ve been assigned new tasks at work and if you know me a bit now, you probably know that I like to do things properly.

So, the task I’ve been asked to do is to analyze and rewrite the custom authentication system of NextEuropa, the Drupal 7 platform used at the European Commission.

PHP experimentations

Wed, 20 Sep 2017 00:00:00 +0000

These last months were busy.

I mean, really busy.

First, I have some important personal projects that are ongoing since years now that are about to be concluded. These projects takes less or more 70% of my free time since 2 years.

Then, real regular work, it’s taking me also a lot of time. There is Atomium, the European Commission theme which is taking most of the time.

A word about Atomium

Mon, 10 Jul 2017 00:00:00 +0000

The Drupal 7 theme layer has, and sometimes still is, been a nightmare to understand for me. In my modules, I’ve always tried to avoid this dark corner that are the theme hooks and inspire my code from what I see somewhere else.

Until now, it helped me so far pretty well, that’s the beauty of the Open Source.

My favorite software

Mon, 01 May 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Here’s a list of software that I have used across my career and which are my favorites.

Some of them were used for work, some of them for personal use, but that’s absolutely not relevant here.

This list is not a ranking of the best software. This is why it is sorted in alphabetical order to not favor one or the other.

What is PHPermutations?

Thu, 13 Apr 2017 00:00:00 +0000

In December 2016, I started to write a PHP library called PHPermutations to handle permutations and combinations of an array of items. The array items can be any type of object: integers, arrays, strings or objects, the library will still continue to work without any trouble.

But before going further, let me remind you what are the differences between permutations and combinations.

Prenez un chewing-gum Emile

Wed, 12 Apr 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Lately, I’ve been working with my colleague on a project hosted on Github.

We were working on a specific part, which is a component composed of sub components.

During the development, the parent branch “master”, where the feature branch “feature/feature-198” is originating from has evolved on its own. Some small bugs were discovered, fixed and merged.

Why a blog?

Sat, 01 Apr 2017 00:00:00 +0000

It’s been a while that I wanted to run a blog. I think, the last time I did one, was on Blogspot, and the last post was from late 2009.

So yes, it took me some time to decide myself.

Maintaining a blog, but for which purpose ?

According to me, a blog is a way to share stuff that you like on the Internet, without being forced to use any social network. Now, 8 years after my last post, I think this blog will be a kind of personal Internet log.

Why companies are not ready for Drupal?

Mon, 02 Jul 2012 00:00:00 +0000

I have been working for more than five years now, as a consultant in Belgium.

I’m sailing from company to company, from building to building, and my clients are mainly large companies with 1500+ people, some others are smaller.

Usually hired as a senior developer or project manager, I’m helping those companies to have a successful Drupal experience.

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

About

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

My job title is Senior analyst but it means all and nothing at the same time.

As a highly curious individual, I am passionate about my work in Information Technology (IT) and enjoy discovering new aspects of the field. Currently, I am employed at European Commission in Brussels, where I am always eager to tackle new and exciting challenges. Twenty years after completing my bachelor’s degree in Computer Sciences, I decided to return to school during the Covid pandemic and to pursue a master’s degree in the same field at UMons University. My thesis is about “Reproducibility in Software Engineering” can be found at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.12666898.