Sylvain Artois

Fractional CTO · AFK.live founder

Building for the web since 2001. Over two decades in the software industry, with hands-on experience at Etsy, Chanel, and several startups.
My focus sits at the intersection of software engineering, ML/AI, and technical leadership.

As a hands-on CTO, I build collaborative teams, ship products that matter, and keep engineering culture healthy under pressure.

Selected Writing

Glass and Checkerboard, 1917 - Juan Gris - www.nga.gov
Building a SetFit Dataset: The Data
Sky above Clouds IV, 1919–21 - Georgia O’Keeffe - www.nga.gov
Claude Code as a Poor Man's QA Team
Political Drama, 1914 - Robert Delaunay - www.nga.gov
Mental Health Management in a Remote Team, A Personal Experience
The Houses of Parliament, Sunset - 1903 - Claude Monet - www.nga.gov
BERTopic Hyperparameter Tuning: Building a Speed-Optimized Grid Search System
The Peppermint Bottle, 1893/1895 - Paul Cezanne - www.nga.gov
NLP supervised clustering evaluation, back to basics

My projects

Kairos.ing

Work with me

AFK.live

A news aggregator that curates headlines from 200+ French and international press sources — offering thematic AI-enriched dossiers, topic tracking, and a curated daily digest. The signal, not the noise.

Journal

A literary blog in French — editorials, poetry, moods, and reflections on the world and life.