Volab is me, Nicolas.

Volab is me. Nicolas, in the Toulouse area.

It almost always starts the same way. Someone turns their screen towards me, a little embarrassed, and says: this is how we have done it for years.

There is a spreadsheet colour-coded in a way only one person can read, an email folder that holds the memory of the whole company, and a printed sheet taped up next to the screen.

It is not makeshift out of laziness. It is makeshift because nobody ever wrote the software for that trade. So we write it.

I have done this for banks, on infrastructure that is not allowed to go down, and for entire platforms that answer customers on their own, at night, at the weekend. Always from the first diagram to the server that runs.

We build, then we keep it running. Building is paid for once. Running is paid for monthly, and it pays for the service: not the right to use what you have already paid for.