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A non-obvious problem for less experienced managers is failing to do second order thinking. It’s not immediately obvious because the consequences tend to take a long time to materialise. This is one reason why the majority of managers don’t learn from their failings. They expect a single tumultuous event from which to draw their learnings. The reality is much more mundane and less dramatic. A…
I have been using AI for coding since Claude 3.0 - so almost two years. In the beginning, my interactions were via the web chat. I would provide some context about the problem and ask for a solution. This worked fairly ok and for most situations it was more effective than using Stackoverflow. I continued to use this approach for a very long time. I shipped Koe: Audio Moments using this approach. I…
Alongside my own brain, my next bottleneck is of course DerivedData . Often I ask an agent to build something while I am trying something else in Xcode. The problem is that they both share the same folder. This can be solved by explicitly stating in AGENTS.MD that the agent must use a secondary folder. If you want to use more than one agent, request that the folder is created dynamically based on…
Last updated: February 12, 2026 This Privacy Policy explains how Dash (“we”, “us”) handles information when you use the Dash iOS app (the “App”) and the Dash Workouts website and related services (the “Services”). 1) Who we are Controller: Rui Peres Location: London, United Kingdom Contact: rui.peres@dashworkouts.app 2) What Dash does Dash is a…
Last updated: February 12, 2026 These Terms of Service (“Terms”) govern your use of the Dash iOS application (the “App”). By downloading or using the App, you agree to these Terms. If you do not agree, do not use the App. 1) Who we are Dash is operated by Rui Peres (“we”, “us”). Contact: rui.peres@dashworkouts.app 2) What Dash is (and isn’t)…
Athletes watch other athletes perform. Pick a football player. There’s close to a 100% chance that they watch other players playing. This is true ranging from your Sunday League warrior, to your Ronaldo or Messi. There’s a point where observing an activity stops to make sense. What that point is, I have yet to conceive. Duration is surely a component. One can pay attention for 90…
A few months ago I heard this episode from The Scientific Triathlon Podcast . It talked about Vasco’s background, his successes and his training. At some point his coach recommended him finding a new coach that could take him further than he ever could. It makes me wonder what that would look like in a company.
I did bouldering for a few years. I remember seeing kids half my size nimbly tackling problems way above what I could manage. Lacking technique, I overcompensated with strength. My lack of finesse was obvious after each climb. It didn’t take long before I was exhausted, my hands bruised, and my arm muscles aching. Often, I would be out for almost a week due to injuries from previous sessions. When…
Back in 2019 I was pretty serious about running. I have had a coach for three years now and was doing a few ultras per year. I was also spending way too much time on Strava. Because I was being coached I started having ideas about generating running plans. The idea is that the plan would dynamically change according to your Strava activities. I left this idea marinate and in 2020 Apple released…
In 2013 I joined Monitise. It was my first job in London. It was also the first time working on a codebase with dozens of engineers touching it. I was looking at PRs from people I had no idea who they were. I was also witnessing some of the worst code I ever had seen. My gut reaction was: these people have no idea what they are doing. Fast forward 3 years and I am now managing a team of 8…
My partner is a big fan of audio books. She devours them. At one point she convinced me to try one. I always felt that I would space out and get lost. I can’t quite remember which book I tried for the first time, but I hated it. I listened for a good twenty minutes and concluded that it wasn’t for me. The narrator’s voice was too distracting. I then assumed all other audio books…
Probations can become a headache when things don’t go as expected. What I have found throughout the years, is that even if you are running a tight ship, having written and agreed expectations goes a long way for everyone. So if you want to take anything from this post is the following: write these down and share them. My approach to probation goals is to not over prescribe them. For example:…
When I joined Babylon Health, back in 2016, the situation was less than ideal. Morale was low, so was productivity. People were putting a lot of hours and effort, but it just didn’t seem like it was heading anywhere. It was a troublesome codebase touched by many hands - some of those long gone. If this sounds familiar, start looking for the following: Bugs are being reported at an alarming…
Despite the current environment in tech, I have decided to resign from my position as Head of Engineering at Vital. I am now looking for a new role. I am currently focused on managing humans, but I am equally proficient as an IC. What I am looking for: Ideally at a growth stage, that requires teams and processes to scale. Flexible schedule, where what’s important is work delivered, rather…
I wrote about ChatGPT some time ago . Back then I saw it as a novelty and a toy. Soon enough I put it on the side and continued to rely on Google. With the release of ChatGPT 4 and while paying for Midjourney , I decided to pay for the former and get Dall-E as an extra. Where ChatGPT exceeds Google is in exploring new concepts. If I don’t have a solid foot on where to start I will ask it.…
I was reading Constraints on giving feedback and it struck the note. I too have been in the same situation: Second, I see folks reject feedback because they don’t like how it was delivered. Essentially, they become feedback lawyers who fixate on the weakness in how feedback was delivered rather than trying to understand the content within the feedback itself. This lets someone feel justified in…
1. IC or Management I have enough experience and evidence that I can do a decent job at both. I plan to continue on the management track. Right now it’s where the biggest room for improvement is. This doesn’t imply that I don’t like coding, which I do . Or that I couldn’t be an IC. But to code again, would have to be for the right reasons: improve my knowledge horizontally.…
Note: I have been running since 2016. I accumulated a total of 5,293.6 km. Most of my training is on road by circumstance, while my long runs are done in trail. Below are some tips I wish I had received when I started. These don’t follow any particular order: Learn about Heel-to-Toe drop. Heel-to-Toe Drop: What is It and What to Look For in Running Shoes - The Wired Runner Have more than one pair…
In 2019 hiring engineers was hard. A lot of companies were competing for top talent in London. Big tech acted like a sponge and absorbed a good percentage of candidates. I knew we could attract good engineers, because of how we were doing things. Building an app with ReactiveSwift was a selling point. Unfortunately it wasn’t enough. We had to crank up our offers. A senior engineer in my team…
At the beginning of 2019 Babylon was going through a restructure, and I couldn’t see where my role would fit. I was managing roughly 30 people with two managers under me. These engineers were scattered across more than 15 squads, in 5 different tribes. The optics seemed good, but I felt my career was stagnating. I wanted a different set of challenges, instead of just accumulating humans…
This topic is a drum I like to play now and then , because I haven’t said everything I would like to say about it. At some point I will make a more coherent collage. Leaders and managers are distinct concepts. One relates to a group of characteristics and behaviors, and the other to a role in a company. What you most see in companies is one with a few characteristics of the other. For…
I’m nothing. I’ll always be nothing. I can’t even hope to be nothing. That said, I have inside me all the dreams of the world.
Several years ago I found myself helping an engineer facing a production issue. This was a P0 affecting an entire country. It was related to how iOS Push Notifications were set-up. Without notifications, phone calls wouldn’t be triggered and this meant that patients would miss their doctor’s appointment. It was bad. I spend four hours until late in the evening with him in the office.…
A trend I am seeing is people insisting after the first email isn’t replied. Let’s look at recruitment. On a first email a recruiter introduces themselves and their candidate. I, because I am no longer hiring for that particular role, ignore the email. After a few days they insist with the typical “in case you missed”. I ignored it again. Then a third email comes and a…
When I feel overwhelmed, or have too much in my plate, I think about about Michael Lopp. Management is about small things done well.
On the other hand Flash was a convoluted mess. An undignified end to Snyder’s Universe.
It’s a nice surprise when a movie exceeds one’s expectations. For what it is, it’s a good movie with a tight plot that gets the job done. It’s unfortunate that it did poorly in the box office - and therefore risking a sequel.
The weather in the UK hasn’t been kind to my small farm. Without sun I am afraid the yield will be weak.
It’s surprising how big a book like Exercised is. It stands at almost 500 pages to discuss health, nutrition and exercise. I will see if this could be slimmed down to half and report back.
How to make a team excited about business goals?
A few short tips for a manager starting out: Hire the best people you can. Identify the skills that your team is lacking and hire towards that. Good beats perfection. Look for people with potential and eager to learn. You are as fast as your slowest team member. Provide the team with problems, not solutions. Give space for the team to find their own solutions. This instils a sense accountability…
This tweet is exceptionally well written. And it illustrates something I struggle with: avoiding thinking in absolutes. This may really irritate the internet but you cannot pigeonhole me into some radical position of either loving or hating every change that’s occurred. I escaped my fundamentalist upbringing and am a free thinker these days. Everyone can be seen as both a hero or a villain,…
I got into a good reading cadence with Revelation Space . The beginning was tough due to Alastair Reynolds unusual word choices I don’t believe I could read this book on paper. I often make use of the dictionary available in the Kindle app.
It’s my firm believe that in the future, we will look at nutrition the same way we look at alcohol and cigarets. We will be in a position where discussing poor food choices won’t be a tabu. We are not there yet.
Ah, but a man’s reach should exceed his grasp, Or what’s a heaven for? - Robert Browning
I am not exaggerating when I say that The Manual: A Philosopher’s Guide to Life has the highest signal-to-noise ratio I ever seen in a book.
The joy of using something like Overcast on iOS, is that it allows me to go through several hours of podcasts in a short amount of time (almost 3x times faster). Today I went through this: Mindy Pelz Tony Hawk Robert Greene Almost done with Tim Spector I have read Tim Spector several years ago when I applied to Zoe (when it was called Project Sapiens). I have had Robert Greene in the queue for a…
YouTube recommended “The Diary of a CEO” a few weeks ago. I didn’t pay much attention to it. I have grown tired of being bombarded with these things. But to my surprise, after watching two episodes, it’s actually pretty good. It’s very similar to Lex’s format, but the host is less awkward. The exchanges also feel more natural.
I was thinking a bit more about this piece here . An advantage of measuring without a specific goal, is that insights might pop without one ever realizing.
I don’t think I have ever experienced full-scale nastiness on Twitter. Most of my time was under a small tech bubble well demarcated - I was following roughly 120 people back in the day. It’s fascinating and scaring to read a few quote tweets from here . What a world. I am happy to have left.
Often I was asked to add tracking to new features I was building - I shivered. On one hand it wreaked havoc through features. Tracking scrolling and time spent looking at particular parts of the screen is not trivial. There were other parts of the app, if not done with tracking in mind, that resisted being changed. I reckon this has more to do with poor engineering than actual tracking. On the…
What happens when you hire a world class engineer, but you can’t provide the necessary challenges for them to stay engaged? What happens when you provide to a product-minded engineer just tickets to be implemented? Looking at exceptional teams I have worked with, I wonder how often we did engineering just to keep us from being bored. At what point does one realize that hiring world class…
(…) it turned into people affirming their positions on things they usually didn’t understand very well.
There’s a natural tendency to avoid conflict and hard conversations. They are unpleasant, they can create animosity. People prefer to go through the long strenuous path of ignoring the problem. David Heinemeier reflected on a similar topic : Because hitting undo usually means at least one difficult conversation, some amount of disappointment, and a recognition that you get this one wrong.…
A lot of cardiovascular analysis apps share the same naive mistake. For the most part they display a daily HR average across different periods. They then compare a previous period with the current one. If I have an average of 65bpm in June and now I have 70bpm in July, they tend to mark it as bad. But what if I was more active in July compared to June? Generally speaking, doing more sports, and…
I don’t often endorse other people’s work, but Eugene is superb. His piece on Twitter’s Blow Up continues the trend.
There is no cost to being wrong on the internet. Pick a bold take on Twitter, LinkedIn or any other social network. For example this one: There will be no programmers in 5 years. There are no repercussions to the author or any damage to their credibility if in 5 years there are still programmers. However, if indeed there are no programmers in 5 years, they will be cheered as a visionary. People…
A beginner runner will push hard in most sessions. Training days are based on feeling. The beginner gets fitter, but this tendency doesn’t change. At some point there’s no more progress. I was in this situation in 2016. I was lucky that I didn’t get an injury with this regime - it is quite common. A few years later I learned that 80% of the training should be in Zone 2 (i.e. easy…
Today I tried the new offering my Meta: Threads. It reminds me of Beyond Burger. It looks like meat, it has the texture of meat, but it doesn’t quite taste like the real deal. That’s how I feel about it.
I saw this book recommended here . I read Epictetus many years ago - I barely remember anything. But the lessons in this book are almost a mirror from what one would read on Meditations . The book is quite small and straight to the point. I don’t have a term of comparison with Epictetus original writings - so I don’t know how verbose the originals are. But I do know about Meditations -…