That’s the question I ask myself when writing an essay or peer-reviewing a blog post for someone else. If the answer is “No,” I give feedback. I won’t stop asking this question until I answer “Yes.” Y Combinator’s Hackernews (HN) is a great distribution platform where top technologists share articles and essays and comment on any submitted topic. Need help dealing with customer support at Stripe? Post it there. If you have enough upvotes, it will reach the front page, and Patrick McKenzie (patio11) will likely answer and sort it out for you. Do you want to stay updated about tech, Artificial Intelligence (AI), layoffs, etc.? Just go to Hackernews. That’s what makes it so valuable when growing an audience or looking to share engineering blog posts. ...

In his book “Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder,” Nassim Taleb explains that the opposite of fragility is not just resilience or robustness but rather a property he calls antifragility. Antifragile systems not only withstand stress and disorder but improve and become stronger. That is in contrast to fragile systems, which break under stress and disorder, and robust systems, which remain unchanged. Taleb uses the example of a human body to illustrate this concept. A fragile body, such as a porcelain vase, would break if dropped, while a robust body, such as a steel bar, would remain unchanged. An antifragile body, such as a human body, would not only withstand being dropped but would become stronger due to the stress of the impact. ...

I first read about “servant leadership” in a job offer when I joined mytaxi (FREE NOW) back in 2018. They were looking for a “servant leader.” I bit the bullet and changed my career from software development to engineering management. Before joining the company, I searched for books that more experienced folks in the industry recommended. I ended up buying “Turn the ship around” and “Maverick!”. These are two masterpieces of enlightenment when it comes to driving teams and organizations. The two most relevant concepts I captured were: ...

Each year there’s an ongoing discussion about tech interviewing processes. It’s almost like Christmas. Once a year, there we go. That’s not new for experienced people in the sector, but it may surprise folks that work in other areas. Can they do the job? The software development industry is relatively new, and it’s disconnected from most Computer Science curricula. We learn calculus, physics, algorithms, data structures, and whatnot. Yet, there’s not much emphasis on shipping production-ready software or working in a multidisciplinary team to create a mobile app. ...

Over the last few years, companies put a lot of effort and money into developing their engineering management teams: one-on-ones, yearly goal setting, feedback, coaching, and whatnot. I believe there are two primary reasons for such investments: As software eats the world, there are more development teams. As organizations get bigger, they start to create more management structures to make sure they can scale. That increases the demand for such profiles. Hiring and keeping good engineering talent is a Sisyphean task. The more capable management teams are, the odds of succeeding in doing those tasks increase. In my journey of becoming an engineering manager, some start-up CTOs and good friends asked me: ...

Working for a startup with less than 50 people is a life-changing experience. One grows way faster by being exposed to problems that, in big corporations, have departments that take care of them. Aside from that, usually, one works closer to the founders. That gives a good perspective on what it looks like to run a business from the ground up. Another common trait of working at a startup is that almost every feature and new products come from the founders’ vision. It may be a conversation the night before with an early investor or a prospective customer. Or it may just be an idea that will “change the world.” ...

Every time people buy a new house, car, or TV, they say lovely things first. It’s the honeymoon phase. Then, they realize their expensive, fancy stuff has flaws too. Engineers tend to take it one step further. We enter solution mode and start thinking about solutions for those flaws and how we’d design those items. We are so intelligent. We’d make it better, wouldn’t we? However, when we do this kind of analysis, we may miss the context. Maybe the folks responsible for the design had constraints. It can be a tight timeline, low-quality, or too-expensive materials. Sometimes, it’s a waterfall process, and it’s too late or too expensive to fix it. We often ignore how most people prefer to have something that works rather than something perfect. There are plenty of reasons why some things are flawed or, at least, they look one order of magnitude more complicated than they should be. I still remember when Andrew Houston submitted Dropbox on Hackernews. The first and most infamous comment read like this: ...

The demand for Software development experts is still growing all over the world. Some people keep saying we live in a bubble, albeit salaries increased circa 10% Year-over-year during the last five years. Atop, there are two counterintuitive facts. On the one hand, people graduating from Computer Science schools or boot camps are higher than ever. On the other hand, as Software is eating the world, one would expect these technology gains would translate into less and less need for writing custom software. ...

During the early 2010s, I was in college, and everyone in Hackernews was talking about two technologies: Ruby-on-Rails (RoR) and Heroku. I was lucky enough to have forward-thinking Professors. In most practical assignments, they didn’t put constraints on languages or frameworks we could use. That allowed us to explore git, RoR, use Trello and Asana for project management, and much more. In one of these assignments, I discovered Heroku. It felt magic! I could just type git push origin heroku, and bam, there it was! My website was live, and I could even spin up a database to store any data I needed. Before, I played with setting up a deployment system using NginX, Passenger, Capistrano, etc. Heroku’s simplicity and serverless — yes, it is serverless! — paradigm made me realize the true power of platforms. All the hours setting up a server, installing and configuring reverse proxies, were now gone. That allowed me to focus on what I really cared about: writing my goddamn application and make sure it was ready to receive traffic and handle users’ requests. ...

Yet another mobile application release halted due to a critical bug. It’s time to stop the rollout and push a hotfix. If you’re lucky, you may have a post-mortem. Otherwise, you may hear someone directly saying: “We need to invest more in Quality Assurance (QA). Let’s hire QA engineers!”. Suddenly, you have a whole QA department with 30+ folks. That is a typical reaction in companies with a track record of problems in the software they ship. ...