Doing Small Things With AI
Sometimes it's just nice to get an AI to do the dirty work instead of having it take my job.
marcgg#blog
Latest posts
My AI Workflow (Without Losing My Skills)
Here's my current approach to leverage AI to move fast while mitigating the risk of eroding my skills.
Hiring Tech Leaders: Think in Spectrums, Not Checkboxes
Hiring CTOs, VP of Engineering and senior leadership in general is tricky. Here's how I like to use a slider metaphor to sort through the different signals.
Startup Engineering Team Organisation
Pros and cons of various team structures for startups.
Minimum Viable Post Mortem Process
Here's a simple approach to start doing post mortems made for startups and small teams.
They Are Really Smart, But...
I always hear about team members that are supposedly really smart but are bringing negative value to a project.
My Experience with Liquid Glass so Far
A first-hand look at the challenges and surprises of updating my iOS apps to iOS 26 and adopting the new Liquid Glass system.
Building an App to Find Highway Stops
I spent a few weeks creating a new iOS app. In this article I go into my process and the results.
Sometimes Details Are Everything
Redesigning my fitness app revealed how one overlooked detail impacted 70% of users. Sometimes, small UX choices change everything.
The 3 Types of Power
How do you even get people to follow your lead?
Controlling the Blast Radius
As a manager, it's important to let people make mistakes... but you need to make sure they are not too costly for the person or the organisation.
Similarities Between Tech Debt and 'Money' Debt
You are borrowing speed today that you will have to pay back later with interest.
Improving Team Morale is not an Objective
New managers often see making their team happy as their main objective. Here's the problem with this approach.
All Projects Are Business Projects
Hot take: there are no technical projects and all tasks should be advancing business goals in one way or another.
LLMO: SEO in the Age of AI?
I wanted to write a small article to share what I've noticed about LLMO and to be able to come back to it in years and see how it evolved.
My Laws, Principles & Rules Cheat Sheet
From Brook's to Wirth's, here is the list of the adages I'm often referencing.
10 Youtube Channels About Software Engineering
Channels sharing insights, skits, news and more about the tech world.
Gaining Years of Experience in a Few Months
While staying in your comfort zone can limit your career growth, there are also fast growth opportunities that - while unsustainable - enable the opposite.
5 Years of Experience OR 5 Times 1 Year of Experience?
Discussing the comfort zone, jobs' skill ceilings and the importance of growth.
Setting expectations for a new hire's first weeks
Should a new hire struggle for days in silence or ask for help right away? If you don't set expectations they'll probably do one or the other... here's my approach to get to something more interesting.
Asking for user feedback
I'm sharing some scrappy ways to ask for user feedback in my iOS app.
Levels of Defensiveness
I think that having an idea of scale of defensiveness helps me a lot when coding. In this article I share how to approach it around a specific example.
Zen refactoring
Sometimes you just need to clean up your code because that's the right thing to do.
The way I run standup meetings
I'm not a big fan of Scrum, but I really like the idea of having regular short meetings with all team members.
Breaking the Routine with a Quick App
How building a quick side project helped me regain energy and get out of tunnel vision.
Remove That Feature
Sometimes a feature is not doing its job. It's ok, but you need to remove it to avoid wasting time and resources.
Minimum Viable Content
When you are building an app on your own, it's critical to not waste time, listen to user feedback and continuously ship value. Here's how I improved my tutorial content over the years.
Typical First Years of Startup Engineering Leadership
All startups are very different, but many VC backed companies share common traits and fall in the same pits. In this article I share the story of such a startup, their issues and how to mitigate them.
Always Having Five Minutes
As a manager, having 5 minutes available for my direct reports is very important. Here's how I frame it.
Generative AI & Writing Blog Articles
I've decided to not leverage generative AI beyond basic proofreading. Here's why.
Agility vs Predictability: Water-Scrum-Fall
Balancing predictability, agility, and innovation is challenging, and many organisations end up with a mix of waterfall and agile methodology, which can be a big missed opportunity for some teams.
Estimates as a Communication Tool
Estimating the time a project will take often creates problems. It's predicting the future and therefore often fails. However, when done right, it can be an efficient communication tool.
Learnings From a Student's Terrible Code
What I learned from a terrible piece of code written by a student of mine.
Don't Forget to Improve your MVP
My experience leaving a minimum viable feature in production for too long without iterations, and why it was a bad idea for both projects and team dynamics.
30 Years of Trying Code Editors
To start this new year, I figured it could be fun to look back and share all the different code editor I've used so far professionally, as a student or just for fun.
Sharing My Take Asynchronously
For the past few years I've taken the habit of sharing short documents to explain my opinions and make discussions move faster. So far they've been mostly helpful in furthering debates, so let me share the format and reasons I'm doing this.
Simple Localisation Process for XCode with Google Sheets
Here is a very simple script to handle translations that saved me a lot of time when building my iOS app.
13 Entertaining Game Devlog Youtube Channels
To get inspired for my own projects or just to enjoy some entertaining content I fell deep into a game devlog rabbit hole, following people as they build their project. Here are some of the channels I've enjoyed the most so far.
One on One Meeting Format Ideas
Here is the way I conduct 1:1 meetings with people in my engineering team. I'll go over the objective, schedule but also the content and give some feedback about using this particular format for the past few years.
Building, Releasing and Marketing an iOS Fitness App
I've spent the last few months building a boxing app to train at home with SwiftUI. In this article I'll share a lot of the things I've learned. This includes ASO, app design with Figma, keyword optimisation, boxing algorithms, monetization, SEO, social media marketing, localisation and more... It's a big one, so get ready!
Force Multipliers
In a given team we have people bringing clear direct value, and others increasing the global output of the team. No group is inherently better than the other and, in order to succeed, a company will need both.
Is Remote Work Necessarily Asynchronous?
A lot of people tend to mix people working remotely and people working asynchronously. While it's often the case that people not co-located in a single office will prefer asynchronous communication, that's not a given.
The Certainty of Failure
It's a given that mistakes are bound to happen. The interesting question is how to react when an error is made and how to improve.
Circular Progress Bar & Timer with SwiftUI
Simple example of how to build an iOS circular clock-like progress bar with a minute/seconds counter using SwiftUI.
Generating Custom Image Previews For Social Media
I wanted to have nice looking social media link previews for Linkedin, Twitter and Facebook... but I also didn't want to create them manually for each article. Here's how I did it programmatically with stock photos, Ruby scripts, the Jekyll static site generator and a Duotone tool!
Writing my Manager README
I wrote a document to explain to my team how I operate at work. It includes what I value, my personality quirks or even the best way to reach me depending on the context.
Add Text Over an Image with Ruby
Dead simple example of adding a centered text to a jpg image using Ruby, RMagick and ImageMagick. I've also added reference to the documentation to go further.
Misuse of update/update! in Ruby on Rails
Ruby on Rails gives you update and update! ('update bang') to modify your records. However there is a situation where you shouldn't use one.
Engineering Team Meeting: Format & Topic Ideas
How to organise a department meeting for software engineers, including format and content ideas.
Podcast Episodes to Listen to During Lockdown
List of podcast episodes on science, design, history, culture, entrepreneurship or even management.