Since 2019, NUMA evolved from a startup incubator association to a professional training company. Since then, they focus on "no-regret skills" and immediate actionability by proposing a committing learning experience in the form of online workshop sessions in small groups.

When I join the company in April 2020, my mission follows up that of the former CTO Cédric LARUELLE. It consists of continuing the development of a B2B product mixing online workshop and coaching. I am teamed with the young and talented developer Camille LEGERON, who maintained most of the Java based existing platform.

As this first product rapidly showed limits in terms of scalability and return on investment, we tried a new approach, closer to what a LMS (Learning Management System) can do, by letting users choose playlists of workshops by themselves, in a calendar. Our ambivalence as a development and product team has let us design and start a new product development. I chose the Javascript framework Next.js, which Camille and I discovered together. This successful technological bet led to a quick first functional iteration.

We used Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) hosted by Google Cloud Platform (GCP). Thanks to a CI/CD pipeline, I adapted our workflow to trivialize our releases for production. This has also improved our agility and reliability as a development team. Our platform was monitored by Datadog which sent alerts to our Slack monitoring channel in case of errors detected in logs or HTTP responses.

I led Camille LEGERON on her skills development regarding Javascript and DevOps. Camille showed surprising learning and adaptation capabilities, and became fully operational in few weeks. Her involvement and the relevancy of her actions during the user research phase has been crucial to define a good development strategy and a clear product vision. We regularly reassessed our coding practices and the result of our strategy to lead this technological tandem journey with efficiency, emulation and mutual respect.

The NUMA working culture is embodied through the training content proposed to its clients. NUMA internally defines, experiments and applies the recommendations to perfect best practices at work before sharing them in workshops. A sane and positive work environment can be found among NUMAns, whose efforts are shared during weekly company meetings by the CEO Romain COCHET.

Finally, NUMA can also be fun when business results are good (and they usually are). This year, between two COVID19 lockdowns and for the annual business seminar, NUMAns have been initiated to surfing by the big waves professional surfer Gautier GARANX in southern France.

Thanks to NUMA, Camille and Romain for this good professional experience.