Blog

Working With the Garage Door Open

Visibility is passive, signal is not

Working in the open lets people help while the work is still shapeable. The real skill is pushing the right signal to the right room.

Laissez Faire, Laissez Passer

The market knows what no one person can

Let people act, let goods pass. No planner knows what the market knows, and freedom, not control, should be the default.

Cut the Token Bill on Both Ends

Two leaks, two patches

Caveman shrinks what the agent says back, RTK shrinks what your terminal pipes in. More room in the same context window.

The Eternal Return

A mirror in the present

Nietzsche used eternal return as a test. Life uses it as a mirror. Patterns rhyme not to predict the future, but to reveal who you become under pressure.

Skills Over Agents

Intelligence without expertise is entertainment

Why Claude Code skills beat specialized agents. On-demand context, not the model, decides quality. Build a skill library that travels with your code.

The Levels of AI Adoption

From copy-paste prompts to agentic teams

A six-level ladder of AI adoption, from copy-paste prompts to agentic teams and AI-native workflows. Where most companies stall, and how to climb.

Inside the .claude Folder

A tutorial through rules, skills, agents, hooks, and settings

A hands-on tour of Claude Code's project folder. What rules, skills, agents, hooks, and settings each do, and how they fit together.

Building a Game in Two Days

What happens when you give an AI a quest and get out of the way

A Telegram message turned into a nine-level Lord of the Rings browser game. Code by an AI agent, every creative decision by a human.

Idealism vs Pragmatism

Holding both ends of the rope

Doing things right against getting things done. TDD, pair programming, AI: the best results hold both ends of the rope.

Build Your Own Team of Agents

From solo assistant to coordinated workforce

Stop using AI as a single assistant. Organize agents into specialized teams with roles, docs, and parallel execution for real leverage.

MCP: Giving Your AI Agent the Right Context

Why context is the real superpower

MCP connects AI agents to your dev tools, databases, and APIs through a standard protocol. Give your agent the context it actually needs.

How Bitcoin Works

Blockchain, cryptography, and consensus

Transactions, blocks, mining, the UTXO model, and Lightning Network: how Bitcoin actually works under the hood, explained in plain terms.

Bitcoin Fundamentals

A beginner's guide to sound money

21 million cap, no central authority, permissionless and censorship-resistant. Bitcoin is digital money you truly own. No bank required.

AI Gives You Speed, Not Quality

The human factor in the age of vibe-coding

AI accelerates your output but doesn't ensure quality. You're responsible for every line you commit. Speed without direction is chaos.

What Success Means to Me

A simple definition that changed how I live

Success is waking up knowing that what you do makes the people around you, and yourself, happier. Consistency over perfection.

Ship, Show, Ask

Match the review to the risk, not the ritual

Not every change needs the same review. Ship, Show, Ask matches the process to the risk, without losing quality or collaboration.

Run Your LN Node on a Raspberry Pi

Take full control of your Lightning payments with Alby Hub

How to set up a self-custodial Lightning node with Alby Hub on a Raspberry Pi. Full control over your funds, 100% open source.

Understanding Taxes

Where your money goes and how to rethink the system

Your paycheck, your coffee, the house you just bought: taxes are everywhere. Where your money actually goes after payday.

The Cypherpunks

Pioneers of privacy in the digital age

In the early '90s the Cypherpunks set out to defend digital privacy. Their encryption and their ideals shaped the world we live in.

Verified Git Commits

Boosting trust and security in your codebase

Sign your Git commits with GPG to prove they are really yours. Without a signature, anyone can fake a commit using your email.

bashunit

Turning frustrations into tools for better development

bashunit: a testing framework for Bash with parallel and snapshot testing, test doubles and data providers. From dev frustration to open source.

People Skills

From code to collaboration

You have mastered the code, but technical skill alone will not carry you. If you cannot work with others, nobody wants to work with you.

What Is Waterfall?

What makes Waterfall a poor fit for modern software development?

Waterfall moves through fixed stages and gives no feedback until each one ends. Why that clashes with how software really evolves.

Pretty Good Privacy

How PGP secures your digital communication

PGP signs, encrypts and decrypts text, email, files and whole partitions. What it is, how it works, and how to actually use it.

Programmable Money

The power of Bitcoin's Script

Bitcoin is called programmable money because Script lets you embed conditions into a transaction. How that scripting language works.

Prisoner's Dilemma

The dilemma of trust and self-interest

The Prisoner's Dilemma, where cooperation and betrayal collide, and what it reveals about self-interest against collective benefit.

What Kills Agility?

Why Agile if you already do Scrum, Kanban, SAFe, or Waterfall?

Why Agile if you already do Scrum, Kanban or SAFe? How you manage an organization defines its quality, and what really kills it.

Learning Concurrency in Golang

A horse racing emulator explained step by step

Learning Go for its simplicity, and meeting again things I had not used in years: multithreading, goroutines and concurrency.

Effective Pair Programming

Embracing quality practices in your engineering culture

A practical guide to pair programming that works: roles, rotation, when to pair, common pitfalls, and how to make sessions productive.

Deployments on Fridays

Why "should we not" deploy to production on Fridays?

The panic around deploying on Fridays. Does banning a whole day of delivering value to your customers actually make sense?

Great Engineering

A great engineer is not just a great coder

Coding is not just another job. In the right environment it is fun, and even a hobby. On levelling up your craft on purpose.

Forming, Storming, Norming and Performing

Tuckman's Model to drive a team to high performance

Tuckman's five stages, and practical strategies for each one: forming, storming, norming, performing and adjourning.

How to Test Private Methods?

Testing private methods. When and how?

From time to time I have had to face this question: how to test private methods? I have put together in an article the techniques that I usually use.

Unhealthy Working Environment

Recognizing red flags of an unhealthy workplace

An unhealthy working environment can have various symptoms that negatively impact both the physical and mental well-being of employees.

The Peter Principle

The rise to a level of incompetence

The Peter principle: people get promoted until they land in a role they are not competent for, and then stop being promoted.

How Do You Get Everyone on Board?

How do you deal with people reluctant to change?

From my talk at the WeAreDevelopers World Congress: my experience with Extreme Programming and the benefits of embracing change.

Never Ending Loop

Writing to help myself sleep

It is hard to get to bed with a blank mind when you are already on the next reading, talk or post. On the never ending loop.

Learned Helplessness

An acceptance of powerlessness

Learned helplessness sets in when someone accepts their powerlessness and stops trying to escape. What it is, and how it breaks.

Dedicated QA Teams in Software?

How does it fit a dedicated QA person in your agile team?

Let's talk about the QA position. The hidden truth behind poor software quality, and why it concerns you if you write code.

Introducing a New Tech Stack

How to introduce new technologies in your team

Introducing a new tech stack affects everyone, so it needs a clear why and a strategy the whole team can get behind.

Have You Always Been Like This?

How to find a balance of growth and happiness

Always reading, writing and speaking? The short answer is no. How I ended up here, and what changed along the way.

Great Leadership

Leadership starts within your own life and behaviour

As organizations grow, leaders must shift focus from customers to employees. Key principles for scaling leadership effectively.

Interview About XP and Agile

Agile is about HOW you do certain things

My interview with devm.io regarding Agile and Extreme Programming. Agile is more about HOW you do certain things, rather than WHAT things you do.

Ignoring Scrum to Get More Agile?

Killing agility with excessive meetings

Boring meetings are killing agile. When the process stops helping the team and starts owning it instead.

Working Agile with Non-Agile Teams

How can you work with other teams that aren't agile?

You apply the extreme programming values and practices. So how do you work with the teams around you that are not agile?

Different Beliefs About Software Quality

Some thoughts about software quality among your team

What to do when working on "bad software" and you can't improve it because it is against the beliefs of your peers? Should you change the company?

The Beauty of Leadership

Team Lead? Tech Lead? What is leadership and what is not?

Leadership is action, not a title. It has nothing to do with management or hierarchy. What it really means and how anyone can lead.

Understanding People

Misunderstandings, effective communication, and self-reflection

One of the most complicated challenges for everyone is avoiding misunderstandings and being aware that other people don't think the same way as you do.

The Project Management Triangle

The Iron Triangle

A triangle of time, quality and cost. it's an indicator that these three parameters are interconnected. You can fix one or two of them, but not three.

The Path to Seniority in Software

How to become a Senior Software Developer?

Real seniority goes beyond job titles. It's about impact, mentoring others, owning outcomes, and raising the bar for your entire team.

Bikeshedding

Also known as the Law of triviality

Bikeshedding explains why teams waste time on trivial decisions while ignoring complex, important ones. Learn to recognize and avoid it.

Dunbar Number

Dunbar's number is a suggested cognitive limit to the number of people with whom one can maintain stable social relationships.

Update Your Team to Be More Extreme

How can you help your peers to embrace the change?

Software demands non-stop learning. How to create the spaces your team needs to leave the comfort zone and embrace change.

The Power of Authority and Obedience

Milgram's experiment

Milgram wanted to know how far people obey an order that means harming someone else. What he found, and why it still matters.

London vs Chicago

It's an integration, not a choice

There are two known schools in TDD: the mockist school (aka Outside-in) and the classicist school (aka Inside-out).

Red Work vs Blue Work

Managing the two kinds of work

Blue Work and Red Work, the two modes David Marquet describes in Leadership is Language. Different mindsets, and different languages.

TDD vs BDD

Design or Workflow?

These are two different techniques. The key to each of them is about the mindset and context of what you want to achieve.

Test-Driven (Development)

What is challenging about it?

TDD is a design practice, not just a testing technique. Writing tests first changes how you think about code and shape its structure.

Responsibilities of a Tech Lead

It's not a promotion. It's a role change.

The Trident Career Model by Patrick Kua has three tracks. Each track represents where people spend most of their time or energy.

Conformity Experiments

The uncomfortable truth about human nature

How far do social forces bend your opinion? What matters more: the size of the majority or its unanimity. Asch's experiments, explained.

Open-Source Software

The power of contributing to OSS

A practical guide to open-source software: its benefits, how to start contributing, and why sharing code accelerates your career growth.

Pull Requests vs Pair Programming

Why choosing when you can have both?

Let's talk about the benefits of Pull Requests and Pair Programming, and my thoughts on these after some years of experience with them.

Embrace the Change

Who moved my cheese?🧀

The tale is a beautiful metaphor of the different attitudes that people adopt as part of their identity in life when they have to confront any change.

Phel: The Lisp That Compiles to PHP

A new functional language with full interoperability with PHP

The new Functional Programming language build-in for PHP.

To Mock or Not to Mock

How to escape the mocking hell

Mocking is useful, but 'what to mock' usually turns out to be a more complicated than expected if you don't treat this carefully.

Sharing Your Git Patches

Another way of sharing quick suggestions with your team

Discover another way of sharing suggestions with your development team.

Never Use array_merge in a Loop

The spread operator to the rescue

Using array_merge inside a loop is a performance killer. The spread operator will help you to improve this by flatting the array.

Typed Arrays in PHP

An alternative to the missing feature in PHP: Generics

Argument unpacking, function variable argument list, and variadics function.

The Process Itself Is the Goal

How to focus and have self-discipline

No goal should be an achievement on its own, but the process itself that helps us to go in the direction of these goals.

Testing Effectively Legacy Code

How to write proper tests to already written code

How to write characterization tests for legacy code to safely refactor without breaking existing behavior.

Strict Types in PHP

declare(strict_types=1);

Why declaring strict_types in PHP improves code readability and prevents silent type coercion bugs.

The Art of Refactoring

When, how, and why

If you see something, in the scope of your current task, that can be easily improved, improve it. And if you have any questions about it, ask.

Final Classes in PHP | Java | Any

Final, or not final, that's the question

Clear contracts, isolated side effects, testability, low complexity and cognitive load, code fluidity, and confidence in yourself.

The Art of Testing: Where Design Meets Quality

From a software developer's point of view

Why you should consider testing as part of your daily development habit and how it's directly linked to the software quality.

How to Improve Your Tech-Talk (or Any Other Presentation)

Some tips to improve your communication skills

We have all sat through a talk that was hard to follow. How to prepare and deliver a tech talk people actually want to hear.