Criteo proudly partnered with the Grenoble Snowcamp event. Engaging talks and cool goodies made it a memorable experience for everyone.

For the past 3 years, Criteo has proudly partnered with the Grenoble Snowcamp event:

• We hosted the last two “Snowcamp Tremplin” at our Criteo Grenoble office, where six speakers were coached and competed for a spot at the main event. More info 👇

Snowcamp

Le Tremplin de SnowCamp is an event organized alongside the SnowCamp conference. Its purpose is to support local…

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• Criteo is also a Snowcamp Star sponsor and has a booth in the main hall. Our primary objective is to enhance our tech brand image and establish ourselves as a tech company reference in the Grenoble area.

This year, in line with our ambitious recruitment plan for 2025, we focused on attracting talent to join Criteo. All Criteos gathered around the booth between sessions and during lunch to share our R&D culture and work policy and answer participants’ questions on topics ranging from data privacy and technical stacks to our pipelines and data centers.

Over 100 participants visited the booth, sometimes just for goodies (who does not like nice socks?) and sometimes to discover Criteo. During the sessions, some visitors stayed at our booth to have deeper conversations with us, and they were genuinely attracted to join Criteo.

Our R&D Ambassador, Sylvain Dedieu, Speaks Again at This Latest Edition

In his own words:

“Once again this year, I had the privilege of having my talk selected for Snowcamp.

My session focused on the advantages and challenges of implementing a company-wide Design System. At Criteo, we developed our own and built a component library on top of it, which my team maintains. This experience allowed me to share valuable insights on optimizing a Design System and avoiding common pitfalls during development.

I was thrilled to see a full room, with an engaged audience and lots of great feedback. It was an incredible experience!”

Takeaways from our Criteos

Ioan Bucur

Snowcamp is THE local event for software development in the Grenoble area. Its speakers are a mix of locals and those from outside, as well as novices and experienced speakers. Participating at Snowcamp allows me to meet people I’ve potentially worked with years and years ago and with all kinds of different roles: CTOs, developers, QA engineers, project managers, architects, and so on. The presentations range from general topics like negotiating a salary to specific programming language features or better methodologies.

I was proud to see Criteo as a sponsor and our stand in the conference lobby. We also hosted the Le Tremplin de Snowcamp again, an event that helps new speakers to be on the stage. Many thanks to @Sylvain DEDIEU for supporting this initiative and bringing it to our office.

Grenoble is a hub for many talented individuals from around the world, largely due to its status as a university center. The Criteo tech brand is becoming increasingly recognized in the area, especially since its presence at Snowcamp. It is well-regarded as a great company to work for, known for its diverse culture and as a tech firm that hires skilled engineers.

A taste of topics presented during this edition of Snowcamp 2025:

Anatomie d’une Backdoor: XZ Utils

Interesting discussion about how the weaknesses in open source were exploited by what appears to be a significant state actor to infiltrate SSH, enabling the use of a backdoor to execute any script on any machine via SSH.

10 fonctionnalités utiles du web que vous ne connaissez pas

This was an engaging discussion about some lesser-known JavaScript features and baselines. Baselines are essentially lists of features that browser manufacturers promise to implement during a specific year.

Défier l’entropie: réécrire ses applications ou reprendre le contrôle?

How to handle large legacy systems. Generally, it is a poor idea to attempt to “rewrite” an entire system. In the end, we are left with two systems: one old and one new that is incomplete, which costs a lot of money to maintain and use.

Le pattern Hive: une stratégie de modularisation pour votre monolithe modulaire ou vos microservices

Fascinating and common sense talk about a scalable framework (called The Hive) that is built on top of the hexagonal architecture. It is a way of building software as composable modules that can be deployed together. Hive architecture emphasizes the expectation that everything evolves over time.

Rémi Di Savino

The SnowCamp is one of the three major tech events in Grenoble, alongside Agile Grenoble and Alpes Craft. While Agile Grenoble focuses on project management and Alpes Craft emphasizes software craftsmanship, SnowCamp occupies a middle ground.

I appreciate the broad scope of this conference. It covers topics ranging from salary negotiation to “Will Sci-Fi help technology?” with “How to use CQRS” in between.

I really liked the talk “10 fonctionnalités utiles du web que vous ne connaissez pas” by Yohan Lasorsa and Olivier Leplus. It started by presenting TC-39, where the web specifications, the baseline (features available in all browsers), and the status of web features are written. If you want to contribute to the way the web should be, feel free to go to the TC-39 GitHub.

To summarize all ten (actually fourteen) features they wanted to highlight, they presented the most anticipated feature along with some forgotten or lesser-known cool features. Here are my top three:

• Temporal: Dates in JavaScript will be easily managed with this anticipated library. It is currently in stage 3, so it is not yet included in browsers, but it will be available this year.
• Node:Test: A test library currently available in Node that can easily replace all external testing libraries in our web projects.
• Picsum: An API to generate Lorem Ipsum text but for images (returns random images).

Valerian Gonnot

As with every great Snowcamp edition, the journey began on a Monday morning with the ticket rush. Six hundred seats sold out in three hours, so you better be properly awake and ready! This success contributes to the atmosphere of Snowcamp and allowed us to connect with speakers and attendees from Grenoble and beyond.

Even before attending the first talk, you already have the opportunity to reconnect with your network and discuss the latest trendy stacks (in case you didn’t have enough LLM, RAG, and Rust conversations during the 2024 edition). Whether I was chatting with old acquaintances or meeting new people, those informal discussions have been one of my favorite parts of this Snowcamp edition.

Then, I attended a variety of tech (and non-tech!) conferences. One I particularly liked was the Hive presentation by Thomas Pierrain (Agicap VP) and Julien Topçu (Shodo). They presented to a full auditorium in a retro style a modularization strategy that decouples the release strategy (a modular monolith or microservices as we develop at Criteo) from the software and domain modeling.

I appreciated the combination of deployment strategy and modeling at the same conference, as I often saw them presented separately in previous events. This joint approach was more effective in helping me see the potential applications of those theoretical concepts in our real architecture. If you want to check it out, a replay (from another conference) is available on YouTube 🇬🇧

Another highlight is the presentation on “Meta Laws” by Stéphane Trébel. It’s a fun yet highly efficient session that encourages us to step back and consider all the empirical laws we encounter in our work (but not exclusively). It’s the kind of presentation that focuses solely on things you see every day but don’t always notice or account for adequately.

To top it off, he offers suggestions to mitigate the negative effects of those meta laws. While some are quite traditional and well-known (hey, Conway! 👋Hey, Chesterton!), others may surprise you. And once again (lucky you!), a replay of Stéphane’s talk from another conference is available on YouTube 🇫🇷

Those were two examples among a few others; of course, I omitted many people, talks, and ideas. I truly want to thank all the staff and the speaker for this moment. See you next year!

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Thanks, Snowcamp, for another great year; thanks to all the speakers, and a big shout out to all the attendees that made it even greater 😃 You don’t believe us? Well, check the pictures 👇

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Did you enjoy the article? Are you interested in joining our amazing team? This article serves as a prime illustration of our commitment to local tech communities.