Pao Ramen

Pao Ramen

Subscribe
I left my own startup to not become my father.

I left my own startup to not become my father.

My father died one year ago. His transplanted kidney gave up. But it wasn’t the kidney that killed him, but his unwillingness to live. He waited for death like an old Indian man sitting by the Ganges bank, but he sat on his sofa instead, watching TV. Sometimes old Spanish soap operas. Sometimes American westerns without subtitles that he didn’t understand. He didn’t care. It all started three year…

Jan 28

⎯ ❤️👏7
  • How to scale hiring

    Nov 25

    I 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…

    How to scale hiring
  • Building the pipeline

    Nov 19

    I 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…

    Building the pipeline
  • The Talent Machine

    Nov 12

    I 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…

    The Talent Machine
  • Antimemetics

    Sep 16

    One 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 …

    Antimemetics
    • book
    • antimemetics
  • Can it run Doom?

    Sep 12

    One 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…

    Can it run Doom?
    • fika
  • Local-first search

    Jul 31

    I 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
    • local-first
    • search
    • +1
  • 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 is eating the Internet
    • ai
    • essay
    • +3
  • Ruthless prioritization while the dog pees on the floor

    Jun 30

    Great 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 …

    Ruthless prioritization while the dog pees on the floor
  • Building a web game in 2025

    May 29

    This 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…

    Building a web game in 2025
  • How to build a game without spending thousands of euros and hours.

    May 15

    This 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…

    How to build a game without spending thousands of euros and hours.
  • It's Balatro but instead of poker is XXX

    May 15

    This 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…

    It's Balatro but instead of poker is XXX
  • A steam locomotive from 1993 broke my yarn test

    Apr 03

    This 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.

  • Garner and the category making business

    Feb 08

    During 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…

  • Why aren't you idempotent?

    Feb 07

    Very 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…

  • New solution to the list labeling problem

    Feb 07

    Imagine, 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…

  • Ideas vs execution

    Feb 07

    Another 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…

  • On preventing mistakes

    Feb 03

    The 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…

tags
ai1antimemetics1book1cloudflare1essay1fika1google1local-first1openai1programming1
search1
  • next
Create your own publication

fika is the place to share discoveries and ideas with others.

© 2026 fika