For a little while, I’ve been considering the potential impact of generative Artificial Intelligence on various areas of our lives, more recently I’ve had very interesting conversations about applying AI to help the creations of manga/animé. This blurb was writing to help think through the challenge...

The collaboration problem: overwriting each other changes In traditional online applications, when you make a modification to the state of the object you work on, the change propagates to a central server that holds the “truth”. The server registers the change and sends back a confirmation that the ...

Last time I used Windows on my main development machine was sometime in the early 2000s. Over the years, I had several side Windows machines (usually because I needed Visual Studio) but I was never really serious about using a PC as my main dev machine. Things have changed a lot in almost 20 years, ...

We’re approaching the first anniversary of when I stepped down from my operating role at Splice. The company kept on growing rapidly and be impactful, I am very proud of what the team is doing to change things from within the music industry. I had a blast during my time off: I worked on a great proj...

This week, Chang Xu and I are running our very first Braintrust LA event. While the event is private and we won’t talk about who’s presenting and who’s attending, I wanted to share with you a note we wrote to the attendees. The idea of organizing Braintrust LA came to us when we discussed what we co...

Security, Privacy and Trust will be major themes in 2020. Looking at this arm report, 30% of surveyed folks were more concerned in 2019 over data privacy and security than they were in 2018. Add the elections, legal actions against Google & Facebook, Apple and others pushing for less tracking and sa...

Chances are you should instead be investing in data engineering so you can take a deep look at your properly labeled and processed data instead of throwing hundreds of thousands of dollars in Machine Learning (ML). ML isn’t magical, you need a lot of clean, labeled data. Then you need a specific use...

Looking back at the last 10 years, two specific trends are very clear to me, here they are highlighted by Fred Wilson: “The massive experiment in using capital as a moat to build startups into sustainable businesses has now played out and we can call it a failure for the most part.” “The big four te...

In a lot of ways, I owe my professional career to music. If it wasn’t for music, I wouldn’t have learned about samplers, sequencers, MIDI and the crazy world of synthesizers. Those machines led me to computers and computer music which led me to both sound engineering and reverse engineering (RE). RE...

In the previous article, I explained what data we needed to generate waveforms and showed how to use a BBC Free Open Source Software to generate that data. In this article, I will show how to draw a waveform using Google’s Flutter UI toolkit for mobile, desktop and web. Here is the end result will a...

Audio visualization is a fascinating topic. We often take it for granted, but sound isn’t visible and only exists over time. In the case of a video stream, you can pick a frame/image and you have a snapshot of the video at this specific time. But you can’t do that with sound. Sound is the oscillatio...

Here’s a very opinionated tour of some of the various technologies available to individuals and companies. This is far from a complete list and the comments are based on my personal opinions which might not match your expectations, values or even experience. This first part will focus on programming...

Originally posted on Medium Impactful innovation is what Research & Development (R&D) teams around the world are working hard towards. Yet, there don’t seem to be blueprints that are reused and trusted across companies. On one hand, we get very little visibility into this process and on the other, i...

I’ve now been the co-founder and CTO of Splice for almost 6 years. It’s officially the longest place I ever worked at. It’s funny because it does feel like we just started yesterday. I decided to write down some unedited thoughts and share them here. I remembered thinking that I’d love to know what ...

I’ve been the CTO of Splice for more than 5 years now, from early prototypes to today’s 100+ employees. When Steve and I started Splice, I never thought we would get this big. What I didn’t know was that one the challenges of being a CTO post product-market fit would be to build internal and externa...

I’ve seen and been in Research & Development (R&D) teams in the past. Sadly I can’t say any of these teams have been successful making a significant impact on the directions company they were serving took. R&D is often mentioned in the context of the military (in 2015, the US Army’s research, develo...

I don’t really do technical interviews anymore, I am lucky to be able to rely on a great VP of engineering and team that take care of the process. I still meet with the candidates but I do that more as a way for us to get to know each other and to answer their questions from both a CTO and founder. ...

The primary job of a CTO is to leverage technology to empower the business and the team. Sometimes that means making boring but safe choices, sometimes that means more risky or controversial choices. I am starting a new series to discuss some of the bets we are making at Splice and the thinking behi...

I’ve always been fascinated by systems, the way they work, the way you can put them apart and build them back up. Part of this fascination is my insatiable desire to always be learning but also a challenge I like I give myself: can we do better? This fascination is what drove me most of my career. B...

Last Thursday I took a day off and jumped on a bus headed to California City Correctional Center. I was part of a group of investors and entrepreneurs participating in a business pitch competition and graduation ceremony for aspiring entrepreneurs — who also happened to be incarcerated. These ninety...

In my previous post, I discussed the challenges of growing the engineering team and defining the roles of a CTO vs VP of engineering. A common question that came up is: when is a good time to start looking for a VP of engineering. I am afraid that there isn’t a simple answer but more a mix of a few ...

Over the last 3 years I built our startup taking on multiple roles, engineer + VP of engineering + CTO, I’m finally transitioning to being a full time CTO. Funny enough, I kind of always disliked the CTO title. This is probably because this is one of the most poorly defined titles out there. It does...

Go is a modern programming language created at Google. It’s designed to be a very rational (read non-fancy), simple, and fast programming language. It’s quickly becoming one of the key new programming languages due to its familiarity, simplicity, scalability, performance, and approach to concurrency...

I was invited to take part in this year’s Docker keynote to discuss how we use Docker at Splice and how our two companies share the same philosophy. I wrote a summary blog post of my talk. And you can read the official Docker blog post about the keynote Video

Ever since I started Splice, I’ve been really eager to experiment and adapt our process to be able to be as efficient as possible while still pleasant. Setting up a process that works is hard because it depends on the size of your company, the team members and the leadership style. We tried many thi...

Through this post and the following ones, I will do my best to provide you with the basic knowledge you need to understand and implement digital audio signal processing. The idea came from a conversation with my friend Chad Fowler who’s a well-known software developer, leader but also a well accompl...

Back in November I was in Paris for dotGo, one of my favorite Golang conferences. I was invited to speak and wanted to share something concrete with the audience, something based on my experience with Go at Splice. Go is designed for simplicity with only one way of doing one thing. That makes prepar...

I chose the beautiful city of Medellin, Colombia to say my final goodbye to the awesome Ruby community. 10 years of being part of a community isn’t nothing and I took time to reflect on my personal experience and discuss the future of the language and its community. Video Slides

Last week, my daughter started Kindergarten. I’m very happy for her, especially because she’s going to an awesome public school. As someone who didn’t grow up in the US, I heard a lot of stories about the American school system but one thing I didn’t know is that kids start so early. My daughter sta...

I’m very glad to have had the chance to be involved with the very first Go challenge. My challenge is related to something we do at Splice: binary decoding. Read more on the Go Challenge website pattern_1.splice Saved with HW Version: 0.808-alpha Tempo: 120 (0) kick |x---|x---|x---|x---| (1) snare |...