The Blue Note
For years, I ran the Blue Note Café in Strasbourg. Live concerts, cultural events, programming. A popular neighborhood spot. The café is still running. I didn't code. I didn't know what a transformer was. My daily life was logistics, artists, suppliers, long nights.
I don't regret it. Running a cultural venue means solving problems in real time with limited resources. Negotiating, improvising, delivering. These are exactly the skills I use today.
Six months of silence
After the Blue Note, I spent six months on a Vipassana retreat in Switzerland, at Mont Soleil. No phone, no screen, no music. Just observation. Silence. Sitting with yourself when everything inside you wants to move.
No spectacular breakthrough. No moment where it all clicks. It's natural. Sitting. Staying focused. Not running when things resist.
It turns out that transfers to code. Reading docs for hours, fixing the same error for the tenth time, sitting in front of a screen that will not cooperate: same muscle.
Pulling the thread
January 2026. I discovered generative AI tools out of curiosity. Not a course, not a bootcamp. Just a thread I pulled.
I started automating small things. Then less small things. Then I wanted to understand what was happening under the hood. Language models. Transformer architectures. Embeddings. Every answer opened three questions.
Within weeks, I built my first pipeline. Not clean. Not elegant. But functional. And that's what matters: does it work?
What I built in 6 months
Today, I work on three concrete projects.
Le Filon automates monitoring of French public tenders. 25,000 tenders indexed, automatic matching with target SMEs, executive contact enrichment.
PepFold is a pharmacogenomics pipeline. It takes a genetic variant, models the protein in 3D, runs molecular dynamics simulations, and produces a clinical report. In scientific validation.
HarmonicFold is experimental research into a neural architecture built on geometry and harmonics. Long, uncertain, and the part I find most interesting.
Three projects. No CS degree. No dev bootcamp.
Nobody is going to give you permission
That's the thing I wish someone had told me earlier. Nobody is going to give you permission to start. Not a recruiter, not a school, not a mentor. You start, you build, you show what you made. The rest follows or it doesn't, but at least you built.
When you've managed a live music café on a Saturday night with the sound system failing and an artist canceling, debugging a pipeline at 3 AM feels calm.
No moral
I'm not writing to inspire. I'm writing to document. Six months is short. It's enough to build something real if you show up every day.
If something here resonates, write to me. Not because I have a degree. Because I've built.