SoftwareEngineer,Founder &Leather Craftsman
I'm Rémi, CTO at SEOPress and creator of Milo, the free subscriptions ecosystem for WordPress. I also run Youmanize, which makes AI-written text sound human. I founded StoreUI, and I hand-cut leather goods under À la Française and guitar straps under BrudStraps. Eleven years at Automattic on the WooCommerce team.
N° 01 - Journal
Selected writing
- 01
Bon Voyage, Eric
Eric Binnion passed away. We worked together at Automattic, and I met him ten years ago in Canada. He was a good friend and a good colleague, and I will miss him.
- 02
My tests said 90%. They were measuring the wrong thing.
I built a chord recogniser for AnyChord, my new app, and generated my own ground truth to score it. It reached 89.7%. Then I found the mistake it made on every real record, and understood that my test suite could not see that mistake at all.
- 03
I have played guitar for thirty years. I still take lessons.
Some Might Play is an iPhone app that starts where writing a song actually starts, with a feeling rather than a chord. Here is what it does, the one data decision the whole thing rests on, and why it contains no networking code at all.
- 04
The cloud has an address, and it is a coal pit in Kazakhstan
In 2021 I stood on a TEDx stage and said we tear up landscapes for coal to keep data centres running. I meant it as an image. Five years later the project has a name, a town, a river and a start date, and the companies attached to it are the ones I use every day.
- 05
I complained about AI slop. Then I built a tool that rewrites AI text.
Youmanize takes text a model wrote and makes it stop reading like a model wrote it, with your own voice or with a paid human rewrite. It does not promise to fool a detector, and I want to explain why those two sentences belong in the same paragraph.