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There was a stonemason in Santiago (not a famous one, not the kind they write plaques for) who spent forty years carving granite for the cathedral restorations. My grandfather knew him, or claimed to, which in Galicia amounts to the same thing. The man had a saying that I never understood until this year: “O rápido nom é o que mais corre, é o que sabe onde vai.” The fast one…
There is a difference. It matters more than you think. 
 Somewhere in your codebase right now, there is code an AI agent wrote. Maybe you reviewed it carefully. Maybe you skimmed it. Maybe you approved the pull request because the tests were green and you had three other things open. 
 This is not a problem to be solved by reading faster. It is a problem to be solved differently. 
 The…
There was a man called Xosé who worked in a textile factory outside A Corunha for thirty-one years. He started at seventeen, sweeping floors, and by the time the factory closed he was operating a loom that could produce in one hour what his grandmother would have taken a week to weave by hand. 
 He was not bitter about the loom. This is important to understand. He was not one of those men who…
The polvaria works because the woman behind the bar is the owner. 
 This is important. Not in a sentimental way, not in a “support small business” way, but in the structural way that determines whether the polvo is good or not. She decides the menu. She knows the regulars. She pours the ribeiro the way it should be poured, which is to say generously, into ceramic cups that…
Someone showed me a letter the other day. 
 We were in the polvaria — the same one, the one without photos on the door, the one where the polvo is good and the ribeiro costs four euros and the chalkboard menu hasn’t changed since 2011. A friend pulled out his phone and said, “Read this.” The way people do when they’ve found something that either confirms their worst…
Every summer, three million people walk into Santiago de Compostela and photograph the cathedral. They stand in the Praça do Obradoiro with their phones raised, capturing the same façade from the same angle that fourteen million people captured the year before. They post it. They tag it. They feel they’ve been somewhere. 
 Then they eat in a restaurant with a menu in four languages and a…
There was an old woman in a small village who survived the Civil War. She was seven when the Nationalists took Galicia — no great battles here, just men disappearing in the night, the silence after, the names no one said aloud for forty years. She survived the dictatorship, the hunger years, the slow thaw. She survived emigration — not her own, but everyone else’s. She watched the village…
There’s a garage in Ourense — not the fancy kind with diagnostics machines and waiting rooms with coffee, but the kind where oil has seeped into the concrete so deep it’s become part of the floor. Moncho has worked there for forty years. Maybe forty-five. He stopped counting when his knees started predicting rain. 
 A young man brings in his car. Won’t start. “The…
There’s a bar in Compostela — I won’t say which one, because then everyone would go and ruin it — where the bartender has never once asked what I want. He sees me walk in, he pours. Fifteen years of this. He knows by the way I sit whether it’s a coffee day or a ribeiro day. He’s never wrong. 
 I mention this because I spent an hour last week arguing with my computer…
$ whoami
 vitor
 $ cat ~/.bio
 Open Source advocate | Caffeinated problem solver | Mondays are fine
 $ cat ~/.profession
 Software Engineer
 I build systems that work. Sometimes I write about it. 
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Source: codeberg.org/choutos/blog
Or: What the man who wants to throw out all his frameworks hasn’t learned yet 
 
 Look, I’m going to tell you about a blog post I read the other day. But first let me tell you about my grandfather’s hammer. 
 My grandfather had a hammer. Not a special hammer — just a hammer, wooden handle, metal head, the kind you could buy anywhere. He used it for forty years. The…