About me
My name is Alban Gérôme, a French-British citizen living in Wales and the founder of Ascalon Digital Ltd. I saw Javascript's potential as early as 1998 and understood immediately how I would use it to collect data to improve the website's visitor experience. In 2006, I joined a little-known London start-up called TouchClarity. Omniture, which created the predecessor to Adobe Analytics and Adobe Target (Offermatica, I do not forget you), acquired TouchClarity. The following years saw me add to this vendor-side experience, contracting and employee experience, and agency-side and client-side experience. Before my career in Digital Analytics started, I was a database and web developer. I have over 20 years of work experience.
Linguist turns developer turns intercontinental speaker
Before my Digital Analytics career started, I was a database developer and fullstack web developer, a most unexpected turn of events for many considering that I never studied computer science; I am a linguist. In addition to English and French, I speak German fluently. I also have been a keen learner of Swedish for many years. I am currently learning Welsh after moving there a few years ago. This knack for languages came in handy when I started attending the MeasureCamp unconference. As I write this, I have attended 58 MeasureCamps over three continents and always present a session.
Ascalon
I founded Ascalon Digital in 2020 in the UK and in the forner Soviet Republic of Georgia, hence the .ge domain name of this website. The name comes from the legends surrounding St George; Ascalon was how he called his lance. It's kind of like Excalibur in the Arthurian legends, but more obscure. I founded Ascalon while still living in London and St George is patron saint of both England and Georgia. I saw Ascalon as a symbol connecting both countries, like a hyphen. The irony is not lost on me that, according to legends, St George slayed a dragon with his lance, and I live in Wales now where other legends say there used to be dragons here, too. We have a red dragon on our flag. The company aims to help companies become more productive through process automation, especially for processes dealing with Digital Analytics. However, many of the techniques I apply to Digital Analytics can also deliver productivity improvements to other disciplines, whether adjacent to Digital Analytics or not. My Georgian company is not active, but if you are curious about why Georgia, you can read these articles below, both by me:
SaaS pimp?
Back in 1995, few would have guessed how ubiquitous Javascript would become. Over the following decade, it has not only become one of the main programming languages, but it is also what powers your websites and all applications that run in the browser. Software as a service, or SasS, has replaced the computer software you install. Because they are also websites, albeit websites of a different kind, Javascript is essential to them. With tools like Tampermonkey, but increasingly, Node, Typescript and Microsoft Playwright, I automate manual processes in SaaS tools. Imagine applying for life insurance with over 20 pages of questions. Knowing all the answers for the shortest path to the confirmation page took me 20 minutes. Now, it takes me 1 minute, and it collects all the data to conduct audit checks automatically. Vendors built their SaaS tools to cater to the broadest clientele. I added bespoke functions to products that the vendor could never provide due to a lack of resources. Think of SaaS pimping as adding an external layer of productivity-enhancing functionality, like an exoskeleton. More articles below, also by me:
Automating
If Javascript had always appealed profoundly to me, this may be even truer for automation. I am a self-taught programmer and a citizen developer, as I am reading increasingly. I started programming as a 12-year-old. In my attempts to learn more programming languages, I started automating my work by learning Excel VBA macros during my night shifts in a call centre in Scotland. I created Ascalon Digital to tap into what I perceive as an untapped market: SaaS Automation. I have automated significant parts of my work with Javascript, SQL, TypeScript, Microsoft Playwright, Power Automate, and many other technologies. Automation earned me a promotion from rep to junior Oracle developer after automating all our manual reports. My macros saved hours of manual reporting, which we did during the night shift. I let you imagine the data quality before and after. If you want to discuss how I can help you automate your processes, contact me via my LinkedIn profile page. Here's another article of mine on this very topic:
Javascript Senpai
A few years ago, I launched a free online weekly Javascript course called Javascript Senpai to address a silly trend: hiring humanities students to analyse data is OK, but expecting them to implement the data collection code, too, seems like a stretch. Implementation is not a copy-and-paste job. Web developers are often Javascript experts, but tagging relies on proprietary code that a web developer would be utterly unfamiliar with. I have relaunched the course as a recorded course. Every month, I publish a new lesson based on the code I showed in the free live course. Once I have published a recorded lesson for the 20-ish lessons I gave live, I intend to bring both in sync with one monthly free live course, with the recorded content and code only available to subscribers. For more information about the course subscription, click here.
The Ternary Operator
Right after the pandemic, as MeasureCamp resumed as an unconference where people meet in person again, I started publishing articles on LinkedIn every week. In December 2023, I turned this into a free newsletter on LinkedIn called The Ternary Operator. I have now published over 100 articles. The name is a coding technique in Javascript which has made my code almost unmistakenly mine, like a signature, considering how often I rely on it. However, the newsletter is not about Javascript and is not for a technical audience. Instead, it focuses on the intersection of data, business and psychology. I also cover, on occasion, AI, the debate about working from home vs. in the office, and DEI. You can read them here.