Paris 2026

In the last couple of years, I have seen some videos from Boulangeries in Paris that I had to visit at some point. So this weekend was the time. I reviewed these videos (random, Luis, Joshua) to make a list and see how many I could visit. Honestly, Joshua video is the best (and longest) and gives you so many sites to visit. Luis video is the funniest.

What surprised me from Paris since my last visit: There are a lot of bike lines!!!! How many churches are in Berlin compared with Paris, so many kiosks with paper magazines…

These two boulangeries were closed for winter holidays! A bit disappointed because the references were really good: Du pain et des idees and La Maison D’isabelle 

On Friday, I tried “Liberte“: cheese baguette for lunch and an almond croissant. The croissant was well filled and tasty. Then I went later to La Panifacture and tried a croissant and Pain aus Suisse. They were really delicious !!! The outside form of the croissant was perfect. Lacked a bit of butter for my taste. The filling of the Pain aus Suisse was suprising: cream and chocolate chips. The whole Friday afternoon/night was raining (not hard). I spent several hours outside so I hope I burned some calories from the pastries

From Liberte

From La Panifacture

On Satuday morning, I went early to Cedric Grolet, as there are always queues. I knew it was going to be expensive and a bit of hype. I bought a “flower of passion fruit and coconut” and Pain aus Suisse. The Pain was really big, supper flaky, super tasty, and expensive, but worth it for once a year/s. The “flower” was not really sweet, that surprise me, the form was astonishing. Flavour wise I only tasted a bit the passion fruit. This is not the place to go every day for a croissant (or you have more money than sense). It was an experience. Then I went for a long walk until my slot in Musee D’Orsay. After that I walk up to the hotel and stopped in “Tout Autour du pain” for a croissant and a baguette. The croissant was a bit more buttery than La panifacture, and the form/look was not as perfect, but still really good. The baguette was tasty too.

From Cedric Grolet

From Tout Autour du pain

On Sunday, I went for breakfast to “Maison Bayat” I tried a croissant, pain aus suisse and a pain aus raisins (6€ something). Very tasty all of them. The pain aus suisse was the smaller of all I tried but still crunchy, buttery and the cream/choco filling delicious. The croissant was very buttery, warm and flaky, the form not as perfect, but didnt really care. The pain aus raisin felt juicy and still warm. Then I went to climb as I was tired of walking. After climbing I bought a big piece of bread in “Ernest & Valentin” I tried and it was good, it had some walnuts and raisins, something I would like to avoid but didnt know when ordered (learn French mate!) And in my last stroll, I stopped in “The French Bastards“, it seems it is a chain. I tried a croissant and pain aus raising and to be honest, compared with all others they were the less good.

From Ernest & Valentin

In summary, I enjoyed good pastries and bread, contemplate great art and walk around without much goals.

The Push

This book was a gift. I knew about Tommy Caldwell, famous climber in USA and that’s it, but never thought he wrote a book. As one can imagine, the great climbers, start very young. And everybody has a drama/s in life. Nobody is immune to love problems, so suck it up (look at me). It is interesting how he changed his training method for the last attempt of the Dawn Wall and with experience he noticed that he sometimes over did it. It is interesting the evolution of the person regarding how climbing should be lived and practiced, as he needs to live and maintain a family.

Sticky Toffee Pudding

I have baked a vegan version but I wanted to try the traditional version.

Ingredients
1 bag of tea
200g fresh Medjool dates
1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1 teaspoon ground ginger
1 teaspoon grating nutmeg
85g unsalted butter, plus extra for greasing (at room temperature)
85g dark muscovado sugar (I used brown)
170g self-raising flour, plus extra for dusting
2 eggs
pinch of salt

Carame Sauce:
125g unsalted butter
62.5g dark muscovado sugar (I used brown)
62.5g white caster sugar
optional 1 shot dark rum
200ml double cream

Serving

  • Vanilla ice cream

Process

  • Pre-heat oven at 180C
  • Chop the dates and cover in boiling water until soft with a tea bag
  • Cream the butter and sugar.
  • Add the eggs to the butter/sugar, the add the flour. Pinch of salt
  • In a hand blender or similar, add the dates with some water and the spices.
  • Add the date mix to the butter/sugar/flour. Combine properly
  • Grease a pan with butter and flour. Pour the mix.
  • Bake for 40-45 minutes. Use a stick or knife to be sure the cake is ready (should come up clean)
  • Prepare the caramel sauce, in a pan, add the butter and two types of sugar. When it is boiling add the the shot and wait for the alcohol to evaporate.
  • Add the cream and mix for 1 minute to avoid burning. The more you cook the sauce, the thicker will get later on.
  • Remove the sauce from the heat.
  • Once the cake is ready, make some holes in the top and pour the caramel sauce on the top, use a brush to cover the whole surface.

For serving

Cut a portion, add a scoop of vanilla ice cream and a bit of caramel on top.

It was really tasty. I wonder how the restaurants serve it always warm! I guess the caramel sauce and cake can be pre-heated?

Happy with the result (room for improvement too)

The Storm before the storm

This book is about the end of the Roman Republic. How the social tension (abuse of politician taking taxes, slavery, etc), corruption (Senators taking bribes), unequal wealth distribution (few had property, Senator were super rich), immigration (Romans didnt want Italians to have Roman citizenship) evolved to violence, civil wars and finally the dictatorship of Sulla. There are many people mentioned in the book, how the rise to power and how they are killed (most of them). Looks like a routine. Most of them didnt know them. I guess we learn mostly the Emperors in school and not much about the Republic. One example is Marius.

It is striking how things are so similar more than 2000 years ago. I read the book as a recommendation as it shows what can happen to the current empire (USA). It can be pessimistic but you can see patterns, not just in USA but in the rest of the world.

And it is incredible how just one city, had some much influence in that region of the world. The republic expanded to feed Rome, to keep the price of grain low, to keep the population content… it is crazy.

There were a lot orators, but the power came mainly from serving in the legion, wining warns. The army is the base on any empire, old and new.

Tortas (II)

This is a “new” recipe It is a bit different from the one I used before as it doesnt use bread starter. One issue is still the sugar (I think) I use orange juice and that is not as sweet as Mosto.

Ingredients

250ml orange juice
125ml olive oil
62.5g sugar (next time use 100gr)
14g dry baker’s yeast (1 sacket)
2 medium eggs (reserve 1/2 for brushing)
1 pinch of salt
500g strong flour (>12gr protein) (maybe a bit more next time)

Process:

  • Warm up a bit the orange juice. Dont boil it. You should put a finger without burning
  • Mix in a bowl the orange juice, yeast, oil, sugar and eggs.
  • Add the flour bit by bit. And the salt, It will be sticky
  • Knead the dough by hand until smooth. Mine was sticker than the video and took me a while until it became that shiny.
  • Put it in a bowl and let it rest until double in size
  • Then divide the dough. I made pieces of 190gr aprox. Then pinch them to form a ball and shape them.
  • Let is rest until double is size
  • Pre-heat oven at 180C
  • Before baking, brush them with a mixed egg and add a pinch of sugar on top.
  • Bake until golden (20m or more)

Just before getting into the oven

After baking

The ones from my hometown are more spongy, mine are a bit too dense.

The color and share were good (still far from the real ones) and the taste as well was not close to it. Still you can enjoye them with a nice hot chocolate 🙂

The Circle of days

This book was a gift from Christmas and to be honest, nothing special, I will always remember the “Pillars of the Earth”. The plot is a bit similar but fails to deliver. Still, I have read many really good books from Ken Follet, so no complains.

AI Labs Power, Colossus2, AWS Reinvent 2025, ASML, Power Laws, DeepMind, HotChips, Tax strategy, Groq, Polyglot

AI Labs Powers: Interesting articule for solutions to get power for AI infra

Colossus2: The tricks to get power between states… and cost.

Amazon Leo Architecture + Internet Edge ARC320: I didn’t know AWS was going to compete with Starlink… but having JB’s BlueHorizon, I guess it makes sense.

AWS Network Infra 2025 NET402: From minute 29 is the most interesting for me. Precast fiber duct banks, TE pre-signalled bypass IP tunnels for each path (without RSVP-TE?) and constant recalculation. UltraCluster3, connector improvements (36% reduce link failures! 76% reduce time for cabling!). UltraSwitch with dynamic LB and adaptive routing (like IB and UltraEthernet)

AWS DynamoDB outage lessons learnt

Kubernetes pod networking: Good refresher

Nanog95 summary:

Veritasium: Why ASML is so critical.

Veritasium: Power Laws: I think I get it… but it is scary: forest fires, sanpiles, money, investment…

Extreme success, you can’t be a balanced person: I like this format of smaller conversations. It is difficult to find time for 1h+ videos

Google DeepMind: I like the history behind DeepMind and his founder. I didnt know they tried to beat the Go champion in China…. and disconnected.

HotChips2025:

  • Datacenter Racks part2:
    • Nice the NVIDIA presentation from a mechanical engineer.
    • Meta Catalina pod 33:39 – 4xracks for liquid cooling! for 2xIT racks. 42:39 3 networks: frontend (N-S), backend(E-W) and management/console. Leaking monitoring
    • Google TPU rack Ironwood: I need to research the 3D Torus connection. 1h15m16
  • Networking:
    • Intel IPU E220: This is a NIC although I wasn’t 100% sure until I checked in another site. You can use P4
    • AMD Pensando Pollara 400 (NIC). P4 architecture. UltraEthernet ready. 48:36 95% network utilization (intelligent LB, congestion mgmt (RTT-based), fast failover and loss recovery (select ACK)= the trinity)
    • NVIDIA ConnectX-8 SuperNIC: 1h13m multiplane – as I understand, you use more leaf switches, in the example 4 planes = 4 leaf, and you have 64x gpu scale

switch radix 512, gpu 8x100G, two-level non-blocking

standard nic 2-level non-blocking: 64×32=2k

connect8-x multiplane: 256×512=128k

Spectrum-X: network round-trip time: 5-10us, packet transmisson 2ns

demo 1h24m (with grafana!)

Tax Strategy: ex1, ex2

NVIDIA buys Groq: interesting details between SRAM vs HBM. And it seems the key is “assembly line architecture”

Polyglot: no magic tricks. I need more exposure.

Pancakes

I haven’t tried in a while so yesterday was the day. This hit the spot.

Simple ingredients and good result. Although I struggle when recipes use “cup” measures…. I did a smaller batch (two cups and one egg) and my batter was too liquid compared with the video, so I will have to try again.

Dry Ingredients

  • 3 cups of flour
  • 1/4 cup sugar
  • 1 1/2 tsp salt
  • 1 tbsp baking powder
  • 1 1/2 tbsp baking soda

Wet Ingredients

  • 2 1/4 cups milk
  • 1/4 cup vegetable oil
  • 1 tbsp vanilla extract
  • 1/4 cup apple cider vinegar
  • 3 eggs

Frying

  • Butter or coconut oil (I guess whipped salted butter, is just buying salted butter and whip it?)

Process

  • Mix all dry ingredients in one bowl
  • Mix all wet ingredients in another bowl
  • Pour the wet mix into the dry bowl and mix a bit, dont overdo it.
  • This is the difficult part. In a hot pan (at mid-heat), use the butter or oil for frying. I used a small frying pan so I just did one big pancake at each time. Wait for the edges to by brown/fried. Dont stir. Once you see (several) bubbles on top, then you can flip the pancakes (I had to add a bit of oil to avoid burning)

I made 6 pieces. Dont look amazing but tasted really good. So can’t complain

Staff Engineer

This is a book brought to the office from one Principal engineer. It is interesting to read to learn from the experience of several people climbing the technical ladder instead of the management one. I have a doubt, as the book was written during COVID and I would like to know if the boom of AI has changed anything.

From the ego side, yes, it is cool to be Staff/Principal but I really want to pay the price for that (working long hours…)? Maybe 10y ago, the book would have helped me to figure out the path although looks more focus to software developers, but as a network engineers, you can learn many things.

Four common archetypes of staff-plus roles:

  • Tech lead: focus in one team and report to the team’s manager.
  • Architect: as I say, big-picture guy.
  • Solver: deal with complex problems, can stay a short or longer time dealing with the problem
  • Right Hand: of executives.

Personally, I can see more attraction to the tech lead or solver. The others two look too political and not too “techie”

It is critical to find the archetype that energize you! And something that is repeated often is sponsorship and mentorship. You become “glue”, you don’t code much and the time frames for any project is longer that you are used before and that creates frustration.

Operating at Staff level:

Work on what matters:

  • Avoid snacking: after doing the low effort high impact things, you need to do high effort high impact ones. Anything else is “snacking” and just gives you a false feeling of accomplishment.
  • Stop preening: This is doing low impact, high visibility work. Unfortunately some companies just care about visibility.
  • Stop chasing ghosts: As a senior leader, you need to maintain hold on your ego to avoid investing in worthless work on a grand scale. Take the time to understand the status quo before shifting it.
  • Existential issues: If something dire is happening , that’s the place to be engaged.
  • Work where there’s room and attention.
  • Foster growth: onboarding, mentoring and coaching are mainly neglected, you can give a bit of time to this and leave a legacy.
  • Edit: Sometimes projects are nearly done, just one thing pending. Use your power to complete.
  • Finish Things: This is a bit more than “Edit”, is unblocking and leading to the end
  • What you can only do: if not, it will not be done
  • Why it matters: focus on work that matters, do projects that develop you, and find companies that value you for that.

Writing engineering strategy:

Write five design docs (decisions and trade-offs), then 1 strategy doc.

The design doc format:

  • Start form the problem
  • Keep the template simple
  • Gather and review together, write alone
  • Good over perfect.

The strategy format:

  • Start where you are
  • Write the specifics
  • Give your opinion
  • Show your work to back your opinion

Once you have 5 strategies, write a vision

  • Write about 2/3 years ahead.
  • Ground in your business and users
  • Be optimistic rather than audacious
  • Stay concrete and specific
  • 1 or 2 pages long.

Managing Technical quality:

Follow best practices, focus in evolution than in mandate. One change at a time. Leverage points: interfaces (contracts between systems), stateful systems and data models (intersection between interfaces and state

You need to measure quality, get your metrics, listen to your users, do few but better.You need to track the progress of you quality program, you need to get a sponsor and show the work, build the tools and documentation to support the work, keep your program lean to cancel if doesnt get results. Be self-critical.

Stay aligned with authority:

Now you are one of the people responsible for company, team and manager success. Staff-plus roles are leadership roles. An effective long-term leader, has to follow first. Listen to questions, define purpose and read the room. You will have to deal with jerks. Relationships are more important than success (hard for me to digest) . Create space for others to show up, make the work theirs. Create a network a peers (again difficult to digest), create an ambient for learning.

Present to executives:

How to communicate effectively: Follow the SCQA format

  • Situation
  • Complication
  • Question
  • Answer

Mistakes to avoid

  • Never fight feedback
  • Dont evade responsibility or problems
  • Dont present a questions without an answer
  • Avoid academic-style presentations.
  • Dont fixate on your preferred outcome.

Path to Staff:

Maybe you will have to deliver a Staff-level project, or work in important projects, you need to deserve to be in the room where the decision are made (and leave it if it is not for you) and you need to be visible (difficult to digest)

There is no a shape match all based on the interviews with Staff-plus people.

Staff = work, timing and luck. Takes time, you need to build relationships, you need a mentor, sponsorship,

Deep Learning for Network Engineers

After checking these links (p1, p2), I decided to read the book.

The first part is mainly maths about deep learning. I coudn’t follow much but at least try to get the big picture.

The second one is more about networking concepts and I had big expectations. There was nothing really special, a refresh of ECN (egress port, inform receiver to notify sender to slow down vs PFC (ingress port, pause traffic flow). ECN needs to kick in before PFC: xON < WRED Min < WRED Max < xOFF. The use of both is called as DCQCN. This is a reference from the book for Cisco. There are references to the alternatives of ECMP as it is a main problem for elephant flows generated by GPUs. But it is mainly vendor features than standards (advance routing and packet spraying). It mentions NCCL and NVLink that is something I wasn’t really clear and at least I can see a bit the point.

I guess, I will need to give a second read at some point to refresh the theoretical/maths part of AI.