Institut Français

The Institut Français in Seoul is the cultural service of the French Embassy: screenings, exhibitions, concerts, language courses, and the DELF and DALF examinations. Its website is where all of that is announced, in French and Korean, to an audience that shows up on the evening it says to.

The app further up this page came first. This is the part underneath it. From late 2018 the site ran on hosting we provided and maintained — a small cloud server, certificates from Let's Encrypt, the migration onto it folded into the monthly fee rather than billed as a project. An institute with a cultural budget does not want a hosting account and a ticket queue. It wants one number to call.

In early 2020 everything moved again: off the institute's own machines in the building and onto cloud infrastructure, the Francophonie site with it, and the old servers switched off behind it. The new site went live that April, with outgoing mail routed through SendGrid so that newsletters and form replies actually arrived instead of quietly failing.

Then the recurring emergency. The site went down every time the newsletter went out, and again when an editor spent a morning making changes — three reports in a month that spring, each one arriving with an event happening that evening. That is the shape of this work: invisible when it holds, and the only thing that matters when it does not.

It ran alongside the institute's own IT provider, who held the machines and the desktops while we held the web, and included the odd jobs that come with a French public institution — among them moving the DELF-DALF examination software off Windows XP, and chasing Paris when the new version stopped exporting the results file the team published from.