The archive

1997 — Mygale (age 14)

My actual first website, hosted on Mygale (a legendary French free hosting service). Made with Hot Dog Pro. Featured programming opinions (Delphi vs Visual Basic, obviously Borland wins), Games Workshop fan pages, an empty software catalog for "Trisoftware" (a company I was going to start with friends), and a page that loaded 20 banner ads to support the host.

→ View the 1997 Mygale site

2000 — Free.fr (age 17)

Three years later, my first year at EPITA. I bought a Sony Vaio SR1K with my own money, installed Debian, and wrote about it. The page got linked from linux-laptop.net. I was asking for help on Usenet the same day.

→ Linux on a Sony Vaio PCG-SR1K

2002–2005 — sarfata.org (age 19–22)

A hand-coded site hosted on l'autre net, a French self-managed hosting co-op. A simple blog — entries written directly in HTML.

Bowling for Columbine — October 2002. Thoughts after watching Michael Moore's documentary, comparing gun deaths in the US to road deaths in France.
Isabelle Achour — September 2002. Archiving the story of a humanitarian worker killed in Serbia in 1994, because no one else had put it online.
Have fun with g++ — 2002. Discovering that g++ 3.1 elides copy constructors when returning objects. (Today we call this NRVO.)
The sarfata.org homepage — the full homepage as it was, with the blog entries and the UserFriendly 9/11 comic at the bottom.

sarfata — online since February 1997