One of the most repeated pieces of advice throughout my career in software has been “don’t repeat yourself,” also known as the DRY principle. For the longest time, I took that at face value, never questioning its validity. That was until I saw actual experts write code: they copy code all the time1.… More »

I watched the Champions League final the other day when it struck me: I’m basically watching millionaires all the time. The players are millionaires, the coaches are millionaires, the club owners are millionaires. It’s surreal. This week I watched John Wick Ballerina and, again, there’s Keanu Reeves… More »

Paolo was a plumber. People knew him as a reliable and thorough craftsman. He fixed the pipes in his small town and made a good living doing so. One day, his friend Mario told him that he’d bought a plumbing machine. Paolo was intrigued and asked how it worked. “It’s magical!” said Mario. “I show it… More »

One of the most harmful pieces of advice is to not reinvent the wheel. It usually comes from a good place, but is typically given by two groups of people: those who tried to invent a wheel themselves and know how hard it is those who never tried to invent a wheel and blindly follow the advice Eith… More »

As kids, our parents established a few simple rules that we would all follow, no matter the circumstances. One of them was that we’d always have dinner together in the evening, typically around 6pm. In almost two decades, they never broke that rule. We had dinner on 9/11 and when mom was at the hosp… More »

I have met a lot of developers in my life. Lately, I asked myself: “What does it take to be one of the best? What do they all have in common?” In the hope that this will be an inspiration to someone out there, I wrote down the traits I observed in the most exceptional people in our craft. I wish I h… More »

For the past year, I’ve been hosting the Rust in Production, a podcast about companies who shape the future of infrastructure. This journey has taught me a lot about what it takes to create and maintain a successful podcast. Well, success is always relative; at the moment we have around 5k regular (… More »

Want to see tomorrow’s important technologies? Watch what hackers are passionate about today. Defining “Hacker” I’m using the term “hacker” in the spirit of the Hacker Ethic, as described by authors like Steven Levy and Pekka Himanen. In this context, a hacker is someone… More »

Last night I realized that my life is very simple. That’s not by chance, but by conscious effort. Life becomes complex all by itself if you do nothing about it. One day you’ll wake up and you have a mortgage, 10 on-demand subscriptions, 20 insurances, 1000 open browser tabs, a demanding job and a do… More »

People sometimes ask me how I come up with things to write. To me, it’s the same as asking how I come up with things to say. There’s always something to say. It might not be novel or interesting to most, but it’s important to me and hopefully to someone else. What people actually want to know is how… More »