I'm Alex, hi! I'm 31 years old and am from Grenoble, in the French Alps. I've lived in several places over the world and am happy to say that I came back home to my beloved city and mountains.
I work in a tiny tech startup where I manage content, a role that includes a bit of marketing and a lot of technical writing. I love writing and researching things, and the job requires a lot of daily learning.
This aligns perfectly with my favorite pastime: editing Wikipedia, or more accurately, Wikipédia, the French-language version of the website. I've been creating articles for the past eight or nine years, having a great time falling into research rabbit holes and sharing them with anyone who could be interested in them.
I had my first blog in the early 2000s as any French pre-teen did. It had butterflies on its homepage and I shared copy-paste posts and very cringe poems. It chronicled my daily life as I left home in 2009 and lived on my own for two years. Then, I stopped for a few months, and when I came back I was all grown-up and different.
When I came back, it was early 2012, I had just stopped my sports career and wasn't sure what to do with my life. My mental health had been in the dumps for nearly a year and I needed something to live for, I guess. And because in the meantime my brain had been polluted by « personal branding » and because I was terribly deprived of the feeling of success that had been part of my speed skating experience, I decided to become − although the word wasn't quite there yet − an influencer.
So I opened two blogs on wordpress: the first one would be my personal blog, under a fullname dot fr format. The second was called Réussir Mes Études (acing my studies), because I avidly read student hacks blogs in English and had noticed how little of those existed in French. I had stopped skating, I was going to be good at something, and it was going to be school. And everyone would benefit from my Wisdom in the process.
And somehow, that worked. Really well. On my personal blog, I only did translations; on Réussir Mes Études, I shared a mix of personal anecdotes as I was getting out of my slump and going through the highly-competitive process of entering a business school masters' degree in 2013, and of generic advice, racking up an impressive audience. Réussir Mes Études got me my first job, paid for my rent for most of my masters' degree, and made me realize how much I love writing and explaining things. The personal blog disappeared in the background.
In 2016, I got my first digital marketing job and decided to revive the personal blog to « showcase my expertise », because lack of self-confidence has never been what stops me, I guess. I had lost access to the original URL so I created fullname.com, and I started a digital marketing newsletter and consulting blog posts.
I stopped again.
In 2020 or 2021, I was tired of the Internet. Truly exhausted and disgusted, and I was working at a giant online conglomerate and it was destroying my soul. And then I signed up to Mastodon, and COVID hit, and I was really bored and reading all that I could find and I stumbled upon Tracy Durnell's blog. Through her, I found the IndieWeb, met some wonderful people like Sara, and decided once again to get a blog. In the meantime, I had changed my first name, so I created a new blog at fullname.com (never gets old). It's at alexsirac.com and it's still running, with the same CMS as 13 years ago when I started Réussir Mes Études, even though I dabbled with a few others in the past (Django and Pico most of all).
I generally have an interesting conversation and get deeply carried away and decide that everyone needs to benefit from my Wisdom, of course!
More seriously − my brain is polluted by years and years of daily Twitter usage. I've stopped a few years ago, but I've been sharing my thoughts online since I was ten years old and I can't really explain where my inspiration comes from because it's just as natural to me as making dinner − probably more, since I've never been very good at feeding myself!
Nowadays, I generally write on my computer, on Obsidian. You can really see at what times I'm busy at work: those are the times when I don't turn my personal computer on over the weekends so that I won't have a ten-day streak of staring at a screen all day, and suddenly I've written nothing for a month.
Every month, I post my monthly recap, and it's the one habit I've managed to keep. I sometimes get really motivated by book reviews, do a whole batch, and then get lazy for another six months.
I do some research, but tend to share opinions more than anything else: if I want to share researched facts, then that goes on Wikipedia, not on my blog. I usually only have one draft, and I'm a relatively quick writer, but I only write when inspiration hits, which is not so often. When it does hit, I'll write pages and pages, that's just fine, but I've never managed to stick to a consistent routine.
I don't get my blog posts proofread unless they might bring me lots of angry comments (like my takes on activism) or they're a translation (I think I'm a decent translator, but I also know after 6 years as a translation editor that even decent translators do absolutely disgusting mistakes sometimes). For that, I'll generally rely on a friend or on my partner, although I sometimes post a call for proofreaders on Mastodon, usually to no avail.
(I also need to note that in my current job, there is a lot of writing involved, and these days not getting reviews on my blog is pretty important, because I need the freedom that I don't necessarily get at work.)
I do not have an ideal creative environment. I largely prefer writing on my computer than on my phone, but that's about it. I do find myself writing on trains pretty often, and I don't know if it's the environment so much as having nothing else to do!
When I travel and know I'm going to have to write a lot, such as during my European train trip, I sometimes bring a Bluetooth keyboard for my phone as I find the typing comfort much higher than on the phone's virtual keyboard.
A fun fact, which might be TMI and so be it, is that I've noticed that my writing output strongly correlates with some specific times of my hormonal cycle.
My hosting and domain name are done through OVH, a French provider. I like that they're French and I love that they have a one-click install for Wordpress. My CMS is WordPress and it's been, with some exceptions, since 2012.
I use Ghost at work and really like it. I might possibly consider moving to Ghost someday, but my server is old and I'm not super tech-savvy and Wordpress won't let me export my whole database because the plugin isn't compatible with my version of PHP. Oops.
Here's a more or less complete list of my WordPress plugins (not super up to date, I should get to that).
As said above, I wouldn't be against trying a more streamlined platform like Ghost, but I do like the flexibility of WordPress as someone who's not a dev and still wants some customization.
I sometimes toy wiht the idea of a static site. Love the idea, hate the execution of moving 500 blog posts to markdown files.
And as for my identity… I often wish I was more anonymous online. But I fail again and again to keep myself anonymous, and I like having my full name there as a reminder that you're never fully safe. I find it almost easier to deal with than being pseudonymous and too easily forgetting that people will still be able to find me with a bit of effort.
As far as I can think of, I only have two costs:
I don't monetize my personal blog, and I respect people who do, because I've needed to do it on Réussir Mes Études many times. I used to sell coaching services (nice and predictable) and sponsored articles (I hated those, but was also keenly aware that when I got lucky and snagged one my rent would be covered for the month). I am fascinated by monetization issues and unfortunately have no « perfect way » of solving them.
I like to donate or subscribe to other people when they allow me to, especially if they have a one-time or annual donation solution. I hate monthly donations because they stack up and I drown in them too easily.
Aaaah that's an excellent question! I feel like you've already interviewed pretty much all of the English speakers I follow, heh.
Today I think I'd recommend you interview Elizabeth Tai and the wonderful Elle.
Yes, a bunch!
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