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How to scale hiring
Nov 25I wrote down my hiring playbook and it turned out to become a book. I decided to split it in the following 3 chapters: The Talent Machine: A predictable recruiting playbook for technical roles. Building the pipeline: A sales-driven process for hiring. How to scale hiring: Hire hundreds of engineers without dying I've explained the whole hiring process pipeline thoroughly, but I left out one o…
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Building the pipeline
Nov 19I wrote down my hiring playbook and it turned out to become a book. I decided to split it in the following 3 chapters: The Talent Machine: A predictable recruiting playbook for technical roles. Building the pipeline: A sales-driven process for hiring. How to scale hiring: Hire hundreds of engineers without dying In the previous article, I argued that recruiting is just a sales process. And li…
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The Talent Machine
Nov 12I wrote down my hiring playbook and it turned out to be massive. I decided to split it in the following 3 chapters: The Talent Machine: A predictable recruiting playbook for technical roles. Building the pipeline: A sales-driven process for hiring Hiring Scaling: Hire hundreds of engineers without dying The room is packed. Mostly men in their 30s, wearing swag t-shirts and jeans. I'm on stage…
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Antimemetics
Sep 16One of Charlie Munger’s most powerful mental models is to “Invert, always invert.” This book does exactly that by exploring the antithesis of memes: antimemes. These are ideas that, instead of spreading easily, fail to be retained. Individually or collectively. I’m only halfway through this book, but I can already recommend it. It’s packed with fascinating concepts that make your brain bubble and …
- book
- antimemetics
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Can it run Doom?
Sep 12One of my favorite activities with my kids is visiting science museums, especially the interactive ones. Pull a lever, twist a knob, press a button, and watch the effects of gravity, light, or fluid dynamics come to life. It’s so much better than just reading about it! Content creators have recently started applying the same approach to long-form articles. Some concepts are simply better explained…
- fika
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Local-first search
Jul 31I hear a lot of people are debating whether to adopt a local‑first architecture. This approach is often marketed as a near-magical solution that gives users the best of both worlds: cloud-like collaboration with zero latency and offline capability. Advocates even claim it can improve developer experience (DX) by simplifying state handling and reducing server costs. After two years of building appl…
- local-first
- search
- +1
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AI is eating the Internet
Jul 28“You see? Another <something> ad. We were just talking about this yesterday! How can you be so sure they’re not listening to us?” – My wife, at least once a week. Internet advertising has gotten so good, it’s spooky. We worry about how much “they” know about us, but in exchange, we got something future generations may not: free content and services, and a mostly open Internet. It is unprecedented …
- ai
- essay
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Ruthless prioritization while the dog pees on the floor
Jun 30Great article on prioritization, and the friction that generates when people don’t understand the most important tenet of prioritization: Time is a zero-sum resource: An hour spent on one thing necessarily means not spending an hour on the entire universe of alternative things There are always more things to be done than time to do them. Hence, in order to do The Most Important Thing, we need to …
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Building a web game in 2025
May 29This is my series of blog posts describing how I built my game, Whatajong. It’s March 2010 and everyone you know is playing FarmVille. You’re a little ashamed to admit it, but you also enjoy playing from time to time. FarmVille is a Flash game that has gone viral on Facebook, and Zynga, the studio behind it, is on the verge of going public. At that time, there were around 2 billion users on the i…
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How to build a game without spending thousands of euros and hours.
May 15This is my series of blog posts describing how I built my game Whatajong. It’s Monday, and my nipples are hard. I’m not aroused, is just cold in February. I open my laptop and a strange screen greets me: “Access denied: This computer is the property of FleibaCorp”. I no longer work there and now my computer is bricked. Perfect. An excuse to start a side-project from my side-project. “I will build…
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It's Balatro but instead of poker is XXX
May 15This is my series of blog posts describing how I built my game, Whatajong. To build my game, I started by re-writing the old code from a game I built 12 years ago during the golden age of Flash and Facebook games: A Mahjong Solitaire called Whatajong. Though the original Whatajong was, in my opinion, ahead of its time, most critics hated it. Still, a small circle of friends waster hundreds of hou…
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A steam locomotive from 1993 broke my yarn test
Apr 03This is one of the few precious articles where an outstanding title lives up to the expectations. I love the “spelunking weird errors” genre, and this one is excellent.
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Garner and the category making business
Feb 08During my time as CTO of Redbooth, we somehow (paying money) ended up in the magic cuadrant of “unified communications”. Our CEO thought that this would do anything to our sales, but of course it didn't: Our customers where small businesses and marketing agencies, not executives that read Gartner’s bullshit to make IT decisions. That cuadrant meant changing the roadmap to shoehorn “unified commun…
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Why aren't you idempotent?
Feb 07Very good review about some techniques to achieve idempotency. One interesting insight is the performance implications of idempotency. It is quite known that an idempotent action is more resilient, since it can be retired safely, but the article goes beyond explaining how can it also improve latency by hedging requests: Per Jeff Dean in The Tail at Scale, one of the most effective ways to curb la…
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New solution to the list labeling problem
Feb 07Imagine, for example, that you keep your books clumped together, leaving empty space on the far right of the shelf. Then, if you add a book by Isabel Allende to your collection, you might have to move every book on the shelf to make room for it. That would be a time-consuming operation. And if you then get a book by Douglas Adams, you’ll have to do it all over again. A better arrangement would lea…
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Ideas vs execution
Feb 07Another exploration of what AI means to software engineering. It's always interesting to see how things change when costs trend down. Programming use to be very expensive, but now is becoming commodotized. Ya know that old saying ideas are cheap and execution is everything? Well it's being flipped on it's head by AI. Execution is now cheap. All that matters now is brand, distribution, ideas and re…
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On preventing mistakes
Feb 03The culture of postmortems makes us overreact on not repeating mistakes. But perhaps, we should be more categorical about preventing new ones. I often think that a better rule of thumb to postmortems could be: If it’s the first time a mistake happens, acknowledge it and move on. If it’s the second time, then ensure that it does not happen again. This would save organizations from a lot of useless…