Big Brother is watching you - 1984

Surveillance 2.0 : when privacy becomes a luxury

🇬🇧 Howdy English speaker, please note that this article was translated from French using Lumo, a privacy-friendly AI. The unchecked, centralized accumulation of citizen information creates the architecture for authoritarian rule. Just ask the former East Germans. This is why, in a democracy, it is the people who hold the right to privacy and the government which must operate in public. It cannot be the other way around.. (The Guardian, 30 janvier 2026) ...

February 6, 2026 · 15 min · Theo Penavaire
AI's take on 'Automating life'

Life automation engineering

Life automation engineering In recent years I’ve spent more and more time trying to continuously optimize my daily routine. Fixing the pain points, and improving my productivity. At the end of the day, it’s all about freeing up more time and being able to focus more on what matters and what I like. As I was thinking about it, wrapping up 2022, I realized how aligned this life mindset is with my Automation engineering job’s principles. At the end of the day, my work is all about freeing up internal customers’ time so they can focus on where they provide the highest value (and of course by doing so, saving the company more money). ...

December 22, 2022 · 18 min · Theo Penavaire
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Step-by-step: Building a Node.js server (2021 edition) — Part 4/4 - Testing

If you want to use the server starter directly without going through the tutorial, find the code on Github. Link to the next parts are at the bottom of this page. In Part I to III we built a generic server with the help of Koa.js, GraphQL, MongoDB and Docker. Let’s add some tests with Mocha to make sure we don’t introduce regressions when we add more code. Requirements: Understanding why testing is important (😉). ...

November 29, 2020 · 6 min · Theo Penavaire
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Step-by-step: Building a Node.js server (2021 edition) — Part 3/4 - The API

If you want to use the server starter directly without going through the tutorial, find the code on Github. Link to the next parts are at the bottom of this page. In Part I and II we didn’t write much code. Time to write some boilerplate code, and to make our first queries to the MongoDB database through the GraphQL API. There’s no easy way to proceed step by step with this chapter, but everything will make sense at the end. ...

November 29, 2020 · 8 min · Theo Penavaire
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Step-by-step: Building a Node.js server (2021 edition) — Part 2/4 - Docker

If you want to use the server starter directly without going through the tutorial, find the code on Github. Link to the next parts are at the bottom of this page. In Part I we built a basic Koa.js server with Typescript and improved our workflows with some tooling. The next step would be to set up a database to store and retrieve data. We will use MongoDB, a NoSQL database. But we’d like to have a single and simple way to install it on each developer’s machine instead of relying on tedious manual configuration. We’d also like to make the installation process deterministic, with configuration stored in files instead of set by the OS itself (environment variables). ...

November 29, 2020 · 8 min · Theo Penavaire