Every year, the industry announces a new “game-changing” innovation. Most of them matter far less in practice than they do in talks and blog posts. A few are useful. Very few actually change how software is built. AI agents did. In 2025, AI stopped being an experiment and became infrastructure for how I build software. It now shapes how I think about problems, how I design systems, how I write…
The question of how to measure software developers’ productivity has long been a subject of debate in the tech industry. New versions of old misguided approaches, such as counting the “number of lines of code” written, resurface, over and over again, despite not reflecting value creation or performace. In fact, setting incentives based on such metrics can lead to counterproductive behaviors, as…
Resilience is the ability to bounce back from setbacks. It is definitely a critical skill to have, especially during difficult times; although it is often overlooked. Personally, I have always considered myself quite resilient. However, 2023 has really made me prove it. And, to be honest, it has been a very challenging year. That is why I figured that writing about it would be the best idea for my…
The Covid pandemic forced many companies to unwillingly transition to remote work, thinking of it as a temporary necessity. However, at least in tech, remote work has become the new normal. But… Is switching to remote work just a matter of working from home and using Zoom? Simply replacing the physical meeting room in the office with a virtual one? Or is it deeper than that? Many first-timers…
In late 2015, based on all the lessons learned from my startup experience , I decided to create a representation of the different choices startups encounter through their lives, as a map; and then assigned some values and scores to them, so that Genetic Algorithms could be used as a way to learn to navigate those choices. Originally this was implemented as a dektop application, but I have recently…
As a developer, you work on software projects, right? …Or are they software products ? Like many others in the software industry, you might think those two concepts are synonyms; but they aren’t. In fact, whether the software being developed is considered a project or a product may have critical and non-trivial ramifications, in many aspects. The not-so-subtle differences between software projects…
If you are in the software industry, and specially if you are in the DevOps space, you are probably familiar with the concepts of “Infrastructure as code” and “Configuration as code”, which are very popular lately. But, what if that same idea could be applied to everything else in a software company? Aren’t documentation and training great candidates for becoming “as-code” as well? During 2019…
The software industry has been growing significantly for the last few decades, and this trend seems to only be accelerating. Due to this fast growth, there has been an ever-increasing demand for software engineers and, since there are not enough developers to meet the demand, many companies often fail to cover their open positions. But, is it also possible that we are looking at the wrong skills…
Continuous Integration, Continuous Delivery, and Continuous Deployment are key modern practices in software development. These techniques help us reduce integration problems, automate quality assessment and make deployments much more predictable and less error prone, allowing us to deploy easily and frequently. But… Do you really know the differences between the three? The aim of this article is…
10 years ago, Jeff Atwood wrote an article he titled The Programmer Bill of Rights . In that article he described 6 fundamentals that companies should provide for programmers to be successful and work to their full potential, thus maximizing their productivity. Sadly, ten years later, many companies still deny these basics to their developers, even though the business case for these six points is…
I have worked in many software projects and have been lucky to be in the initial team of several software products . Besides, having acted both as a Developer and as a Product Manager has allowed me to have a wider view of what usually causes most friction between business and engineering: time estimates. It usually starts with managers or customers asking “when will <this idea> be ready?” and it…
…That I will take into account for the next one. Being the Founder and CEO of Vocabulary Notebook for more than 2 years (from September, 2012 to January 2015) was one of the most intense, enriching, stressful and exciting experiences I have ever lived. During this period I went from doing some mockups alone at home and printing them in paper to use them as low fidelity MVPs for customer discovery;…
Too often people tend to think that UX is just art: Flat design, Modern UI and animations… But art represents only a tiny part of the User Experience. Some developers go one step further and think that it also implies strong technical skills (to achieve a good performance, proper-functioning software, etc). However, that is still a very narrow perspective of User / Customer Experience. Some of us…
Thanks to my experience as Entrepreneur and Product Manager, I realized long ago about something that is totally counterintuitive for many other software engineers. This realization is that, when developing a software product, our main focus should always be sales. Always. Sales. I know that probably too many people have said that already, but it is so true that it is worth saying it once more,…
The 8th of September 2012 I started to work intensively on an idea I called Vocabulary Notebook. With that idea I was planning to solve a problem that myself and many other English students experience while learning vocabulary. It has already been a year since then and that idea is now a real platform used by thousands of students and teachers around the world. I must say that I’m quite proud of…
I would like to start this post anouncing that this month I am leaving Arte Consultores Tecnológicos , after one year and seven months working there as an Analyst/Programmer (Front-end Engineer). I have made this decision because right now I need to devote myself exclusively to Langproving, which is in need of my full atention at this critical moment in which our MPV is finished and we have to…
I had this article started but uncompleted since September 2012, and as a New Year’s Resolution for 2013 I decided to finish it. Back then, I had been working for some months as a Front-end engineer in Stat4you . In the early summer we were in a hurry to finish the alpha version of the platform, so we released it without paying too much atention to the details. A feature that was included in this…
The Front-end engineer is a relatively recent role in software development, but its importance is growing everyday as the importance of Javascript does. I’ve been working as a front-end engineer in the Stat4you project since January and in this article I will try to describe this role, emphasize its importance and highlight the differences that the introduction of Javascript has brought to the…
I’ve been trying to set up a new Blog for a while, but to use a nice excuse, I haven’t had enough time to do it. On Friday I was talking with my workmate Axel about Octopress and it seemed interesting to me. I have just finished the installation and deployment of it using GitHub and it has been rather easy. While I was reading about Octopress, I found this post where the author writes about the…