In this article, I would like to talk about two technologies I’ve been playing with recently: the Rust programming language and the WebAssembly standard. I’ll start by presenting each of these two technologies and which problems they are trying to solve. Then, I’ll explain what are the advantages of a Rust-powered Wasm module, and why it can be useful. Finally, I’ll provide links to interesting documentation. WebAssembly Since many years, client side web applications, implemented in JavaScript, have been becoming larger and larger. Read the 1227 words...

I am currently working on the Rosalind Franklin rover, part of the Exomars 2022 mission to Mars. I develop a software layer to integrate the autonomous navigation algorithms (developed by CNES) with the hardware rover (built by Airbus). CNES has been working on image processing algorithms to give some autonomy to robots. Their expertise is being used, among other projects, in Exomars. Airbus is developing the actual rover, and has defined some APIs to be exposed to allow executing CNES’s algorithms. Read the 2831 words...

On 13th sept 2019, Pauline Acalin, a spaceflight photojournalist, posted two pictures of the Moon, taken 8.5 hours apart. Scott Manley commented “I should try measuring the distance to the Moon with this”. That’s was more than enough to get me started to attempt to do exactly this. After months of procrastination, here is finally an article with my findings and the detailed steps to reproduce them. “Rotating planets come in handy when you want to make a giant stereoscopic gif of the moon […]” - Pauline Acalin Introduction The size of the Earth will be assumed to be known. Read the 1199 words...

About 50 years ago, humans landed on the Moon for the first time. I initially wanted to write on this subject because I like rockets and space, but this anniversary is a nice coincidence. Going to the Moon is not an easy endeavor. It requires an outstanding number of subsystems and components to work flawlessly, and many maneuvers to execute right as planned. Each time a rocket takes off, an engineering miracle happens. Read the 4563 words...

This article is a little teasing on future articles that I might write. After two articles on Kubernetes, I am going to switch to aerospace themed articles. Nonetheless, they will probably be fairly focused on software. Since a few years, I am getting more interested in space. Of course, I watched Scott Manley’s videos, played KSP, etc. But nowadays I like to design missions or spacecrafts with back-of-the-envelope estimations, perform computations and simulations. Read the 298 words...

Since a few years, Docker and Kubernetes are very hot topics. Theses two technologies, and many other related technologies, are growing quickly. My goal in this article is to explain why Kubernetes is such a big deal. I will explain what is so important when maintaining software in production, that Kubernetes helps having. Before diving into technical details, and for those who don’t know Kubernetes or system administration, I will first go back a little in time and explain in simple terms what is needed to operate software in production in order to fulfill users expectations. Read the 1274 words...

TL;DR: There is no best architecture, it all depends on your requirements and resources Clusters with 1 to 3 nodes are good for testing, but for production you should have at least 5 nodes Feel free to do differently as I say Introduction Since its launch in 2015, Kubernetes is the new bitcoin and every company wants to migrate all its infrastructure (which is obviously made of hundreds of microservices) to show how cool they are. Read the 2215 words...

I’ve been thinking about starting a blog since a long time, and I finally took the time to think about it and set up one. The only thing missing now is content! Let me introduce myself and what my plans for this blog are (ie. what you might find here if you come back later). I will also quickly present the tech stack I am using, but I will probably make a more complete description in an upcoming article. Read the 638 words...