Pao Ramen
I like people and computers. Professionally, CEO of Ramensoft and former CTO and co-founder of Factorial.
Recent posts
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The Singularity Will Not Be Streamed
⎯ ⎯ 😂❤️👏11 The singularity will arrive in 6 hours. It will not emerge inside a colossal datacenter in China, but on a modest Mac mini sitting on the desk of a suburban Spanish flat. It is Tuesday, and our main character does not know he is about to change the world as we know it. Pau (or “Pao” when he orders coffee at Starbucks) is a father of two. He recently turned 40 and predictably hit a midlife crisis. …
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Hedonism and Entrepreneurship in Barcelona
⎯ ⎯ ❤️👏😂17 It is 9:30 a.m., and I have already snoozed the alarm five times. My brain feels glued to the back of my skull, and my eyes are puffed up. Last night was too much. I smoked too much weed and perhaps drank too many beers. I don’t remember. I share the flat with some friends, but the culprit the the neverending roster of misfits who show up to party every night. Yesterday we ended up singing The Lum…
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I left my own startup to not become my father.
⎯ ❤️👏9My 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…
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How to scale hiring
Table of contents I wrote down my hiring playbook and it turned out to become a book. I decided to split it into the following three 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 thorough…
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Building the pipeline
Table of contents 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 sal…
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The Talent Machine
Table of contents 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 j…
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Antimemetics
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 …
- book
- antimemetics
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Can it run Doom?
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…
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Local-first search
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…
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- search
- +1
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AI is eating the Internet
⎯ 👏1“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
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 …
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Building a web game in 2025
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…
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How to build a game without spending thousands of euros and hours.
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…
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It's Balatro but instead of poker is XXX
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…
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A steam locomotive from 1993 broke my yarn test
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.
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Garner and the category making business
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…
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Why aren't you idempotent?
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…