What's the best advice you've ever received?

Elisa UsaiSenior Delivery Manager @dbi services

Do you have a piece of advice that struck you since the beginning?

Trust yourself. Not because we necessarily always have all the answers, but because we have the capacity to learn, to progress, to adapt. And a lot of great opportunities, sometimes, as my own path maybe proves a little, arrive when you step out of your comfort zone. So you have to believe a little in your path, in your skills, and sometimes in your capacity to take on new challenges.

Yves ColinCustomer Engineer Data Management @Google

Is there an encounter or piece of advice that really marked you since the start of your career?

It's not one particular encounter, but rather interacting as a database expert, going to conferences and building relationships with people working in this field, that let me broaden my perspective, see what people are doing in the field, the different tools they use, and try to dig deeper because you see different points of view. It's about integrating into these conferences, sharing. When I mentioned Bertrand, he's the kind of person who helped me grow. It's about letting encounters happen naturally over time. We actually met on Twitter, discussing databases.

Damien ClochardCo-founder & Product Owner @Dalibo

Is there a piece of advice or an encounter that marked you?

I'd say... very early on, someone told me: fail, you need to fail as fast as possible. It's counterintuitive, but it's really true. You can't be afraid of mistakes. Building a real culture of the right to fail is hugely important. What I try to do every day is: when something goes wrong, don't pile on people, don't point fingers, treat every mistake, every blunder as a way to learn. When you're creating a company, you often get paralyzed, "I can't mess up, I can't mess up.

Ege GüneşTeam Lead, Kubernetes Operators @Percona

What's the best advice you've received in your life?

I've been thinking about this question since this morning, trying to come up with the best piece of advice I could share. To be honest, one thing keeps coming back to me. It's not advice that someone personally gave me. It's a saying that comes up often in Agile environments: "If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together." That idea has had a huge impact on me and has shaped much of my career philosophy.

Matt CornillonData Cloud & AI Specialist @Google

What is the best advice you have been given?

I would say there are two essential things. The first is curiosity. IT evolves constantly, technologies change all the time, and I do not think you can really do this job without wanting to keep learning and understanding. That curiosity is indispensable, not only to progress, but also to keep enjoying what you do over the long term. The second is daring. Daring to try things, launch projects, speak publicly, change jobs, step out of your comfort zone. Today we have access to incredible tools that make it much easier to create and experiment than before. Even when it does not work, failure is part of learning.

Cedric VillemainPresident / CEO @Data bene

What's the best piece of advice you've ever received?

I talked about it with my wonderful wife. She gave me the French version, but I've kept the English one. It's pretty much "Just do it." It's advice that has helped me and kept coming up at moments in life where there were choices to make and you think, do I do this or not. At some point you just have to do it to find out if it works. If you want to know whether something is possible, you do it and you'll see.

Mikaël FrancoeurSoftware Engineer @Turso

Have you received advice that changed you, that really helped you in life?

My number one piece of advice, something someone told me that has stayed with me for the last ten years, is: sometimes in life, a door opens, and when it closes, it doesn't reopen. It doesn't reopen after that. So that's how I live my life. I live by seeing doors open and saying: "Oh, I'm going to go see what's behind that door." For me, it's always been a quality I try to develop, the quality of serendipity, of finding things you weren't looking for. And saying: "Look, there's something interesting in that direction. Let me go see what it is.”

Franck PachotDeveloper Advocate @MongoDB

What is the best advice you have ever received?

Do not be afraid to change your mind. In tech, we often have very strong positions on databases. The best advice I was given is to remain intellectually honest: if the data or experience contradicts what we believed, that is a chance to learn, not a threat.