In June 2018, I joined mytaxi ( FREE NOW ), a competitor of Uber in the ride-hailing space, as Backend Chapter Lead. I was looking for an opportunity to grow in technical leadership. Honestly, I did not even fully understand what “Chapter Lead” meant. After some research, I learned it was part of Spotify ’s squad (team) and chapter (horizontal domain, such as iOS, Android, Backend, Data, etc.)…
The software development industry during the 2010–2020 decade created roles such as Engineering Manager (EM) and Tech Lead (TL). People had already been using one or the other, but during that decade, most companies adopted them. While they vary by company, they share common elements. Note : this article is a translation from the original “ Señales de un buen Tech Lead ”, in Spanish. However, this…
I’ve been thinking more about the Fizzy launch and the reaction around it. To me, the most interesting part is not the Kanban app itself, but the model behind it. A lot of the discussion online jumped straight to the label. “It’s not real open source”. Sure, if your first instinct is to evaluate everything by strict licensing categories, Fizzy will not tick every box. But focusing solely on the…
Generative artificial intelligence has amazed the World. Since OpenAI launched ChatGPT 3, its user adoption has been staggering. In 2022, ChatGPT surpassed one million users in just five days. For comparison, Instagram needed 2.5 months back in 2010. And it’s not just OpenAI. Anthropic has Claude, one of the best models for programming tasks. Google is pushing forward with Gemini and VEO, leaders…
Every time we talk about promotions and career paths, we listen a lot about how to get there . Today, I want to tell the story of how I failed to get the role... twice! For context: I joined Adevinta as Engineering Manager of the Runtime team in late 2020. We were part of an internal Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) offering. We provided SCHIP, a Kubernetes container runtime. Fast forward a few years.…
As per last week’s rumors, Meta will judge employee performance based on AI skills . Nothing new. Other companies, like Zapier, have even published what they expect “AI fluency” for all new hires: Every time a company announces “AI usage dashboards,” people get mad. My timeline on X gets full of surveillance , micromanagement , and bullshit rankings . I get the reaction. Engineers hate anything…
When I first wrote about microservice disasters , I thought we'd eventually "solve" them, with better tooling, frameworks, and operational maturity. We didn't. We just learned to live with the chaos. Distributed systems will always surprise you: timeouts, retries, and fallacies don't disappear; they just shift shape. Maybe that's the real lesson: software engineering isn't about eliminating…
This week, Dwarkesh Patel interviewed Andrej Karpathy and covered the future trajectory of Artificial Intelligence (AI). For those who don't know, Karpathy is a leading AI researcher and co-founder of OpenAI. There's one particular part of the interview that's getting quoted everywhere: People are interpreting that quote as "don't write, just build." But that's not quite right. Karpathy is…
A few years ago, I wrote that remote work was here to stay. I still believe that. The nuance I missed: remote is a tool, not a belief system. Some teams will win by being remote-first. Others will win by being together. Both can work. Factorial , a Barcelona-based startup that builds HR software, just made a clear choice: five days in the office, one flex day if your manager agrees . If you follow…
There's a massive hype about Large Language Models (LLMs) and Artificial Intelligence (AI), in general. A few days ago, OpenAI and AMD announced a partnership to deploy six gigawatts of AMD GPUs, with an initial rollout scheduled for 2026. I've been using ChatGPT since 2022. I did one or two projects with it, even before agentic coding was a thing. Still, I could build a "score guesser" for the…
At Adevinta , Alex Moleiro initiated a project a few years ago in his Platform teams: instead of asking people, "Can you just create me a ticket?" when they had a problem and passed by a Slack channel, he started automating that creation. In that way, there was a win-win situation: People got support right where they were. No copy-and-paste, no friction. The member of a team reacted with an emoji…
I'm a regular user of " BcnEng ," a Slack workspace dedicated to Barcelona (software) Engineers. It's a huge group, with almost 15 thousand members. The other day, someone asked if stating "(...) this offer is not for you if you want a 9-5 job" was a red flag in a job offer: You can see, by the reactions, that many people consider it a red flag. Currently, there is a prevailing sentiment in most…
Leading teams and building platforms across different contexts made me rethink. Some opinions proved reliable and continued to guide decisions. Others failed under pressure or became blockers. Along the way, I picked up new ones, usually the hard way. This post reflects how my thinking has evolved: what I still believe, don't, and have learned to value. Kept Typed languages are better . In my…
On the build vs buy dilemma that software engineering leaders often discuss, I tend to stick with Peter Drucker 's philosophy: Do what you do best and outsource the rest Twenty years ago, big tech had to invent everything from scratch , but today, some developer tools and infrastructure exist as open source or as a service. You work on your competitive edge and "outsource" the battle-tested…
Note : I’ve translated this article into Spanish on November 20th, 2025. Because this is a long read, you can find the article in the “Desde mi terminal” newsletter . Imagine this: you're working hard in your tech company, perhaps building a cool new feature or keeping the infrastructure humming, and then word comes down that your company is being acquired, not by another tech giant but by a…
Last year, I accepted a "Head of Engineering" position at Adevinta. It meant that I was moving from managing a single (big, with a complex domain) team in the cloud and infrastructure domain to joining the pure product and engineering side. I was about to manage managers for the first time. I learned a few things during the year and wanted to reflect on them. One: There's always a fire somewhere…
Leading Product engineering, Platform, DevEx, or other internal teams is very different. One of them has high visibility with senior leadership and the executive team. They can even use the features you build! The other one often gets questioned by part of the exec team, and their leaders suffer to staff teams adequately and translate the real value their teams provide. I've been working on a…
Yesterday, I came across yet another article explaining how promotions work at big tech. At this point, it's no surprise to anyone that individual contributors and the management team prefer to work on "impactful" projects rather than polish a specific product, even if that's what their users are asking for. We know that promotions in big tech are a broken process. It's a game. Here's a quote from…
In many conversations, people ask me: “Why did you get into a management position?”. I’ve answered countless times. The main factor was to help other people grow and succeed as a team. But it was also driven by poor management experiences, contrasting with what I read about how big tech companies (FAANG) were doing it. I started seeing patterns, and there were two of them that gave me the final…
In his book " Drive : The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us," Daniel Pink talks about "motivation 3.0", which comes after basic needs are covered ("motivation 1.0") and carrots and sticks ("motivation 2.0"). There are three main components in Pink's theory: Autonomy to be in control of our destiny — how do we work? Is there a dress code? Strict code guidelines, etc. — without the need to…
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?…
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…
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 "…
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,…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…