Since I migrated this blog to Hugo, I’ve been contemplating the idea of writing some articles in English.

But I had abstained until now for various reasons.

The main one is about the domain.
Having .fr as tld means that the website’s content should be in French.
Posting English articles behind a .fr domain is contrary to how I see the Web.
But nowadays, tlds are a complete mess now that vanity ones are a thing.
And referencing is not a concern anymore, thanks to AI.

The second reason is about French culture.
Not only are most of the French people absolute trash at English, even after a complete education, but we do everything we can to annihilate every effort made by our fellow countrymen to try and better themselves.
It takes two forms:

  • We mock anyone who tries to speak or write in English by calling them pretentious
  • We shame the hell out of every single little mistake one can make in speaking or writing English

With time, I learned not to care about this.
I saw first-hand how people behaving this way kept going nowhere, when my English improved so quickly that I didn’t even notice until someone pointed it out.

The last one is because I don’t want to exclude people who can’t or don’t want to read English; my readership being already limited as it is.
Sorry not sorry, I’m not here to serve.
And technically, more people can read English than French.
It could make the number of readers skyrocket!

So then why do it?

I enjoy writing.
Here, I can share simple things with the World, or I can try and go further by taking the time to carefully craft some writings.
Not only does it force me to organize my thoughts, but it also gives me the opportunity to be creative with my writing.
I write every day, be it some code to automate a task, some insults to my coworkers, a few words with emojis in a message to friends or family, a prompt to an LLM…
Writing is by far my favorite form of expression.
Unfortunately, people either don’t know how to read or just don’t care.
So even when I make the effort to explain things in detail, I know that it is a waste of time.
It usually creates great confusion that we have to resolve by discussing it orally.
Now I have to double my initial effort.
Meanwhile, my blog is not here to achieve some understanding with anyone else.
If someone reads it and gets confused, I don’t care.
And at work, it’s like how it was at school: I’m supposed to follow some hard-written rules and use some specific and limited vocabulary.
There’s no room for creativity, which removes all the fun of writing.
My blog, my playground.

More and more, my days are filled with English.
I read stuff in English: technical documentation, blog posts, books…
I listen to stuff in English: music, podcasts…
I watch stuff in English: YouTube videos, shows, movies…
I write stuff in English: code, documentation, emails…
I exchange with people in English: Discord, Teams…
And I realized that regularly, with increasing frequency, I’m thinking in English.
My inner voice ditches Molière for Shakespeare.
Which initially created lots of confusion for me.
When I was trying to express my thoughts in French like I normally do, I couldn’t find the right words because the ideas were initially produced in English and my inner translator couldn’t keep up.
I got used to it, but still.
If I come up with a reflexion on something in plain English, it seems stupid to translate it to French just to be able to post it here.
Furthermore, I’m often unsatisfied with my translation effort, removing once again the pleasure of writing.

Lastly, I think it’s an interesting exercise.
Not only to continue improving my English, but also to increase the size of the playground to which I referred earlier.
Or, at least, adding some new toys to it.

So here we are, the first article of this blog in English.

The same way I do for articles in French, I’m just doing basic proofreading, so mistakes must be expected.
And to tell the truth, I’m probably making some of them on purpose.
For the sake of annoying those sad gentlemen.

Like everything else I do here, there’s no commitment on my side.
Maybe it was just a one-off.
Maybe there’s a lot more to come.
Maybe I’ll switch to English entirely.
I don’t know.
I don’t care.

I’m just glad I did it this time.

Enjoy!