As I left Toptal, I got two weeks of paid leave and decided to use them to try and build a small web venture that had the potential to be cool. As I explained this to a few friends, I realized the idea could work. A few friends generously volunteered their extra nights, and we went on to work. In t…

We are not giving developers "sustainable feedback." One of the essential concepts in Agile Development the idea of sustainable pace. At the time Agile was first proposed, this was an indispensable alternative for death marches. Death marches occur when we try to implement the very unreasonable …

I've been working in developer leadership roles for the past 15 years. Over this time I've been noticing that, when some magic conditions happened, a few of the teams I was leading became amazing places to be. Some other teams always failed to shine. Over time I called the successful ones "dream tea…

I didn't post much in the past year due to moving, starting a new job and having a ton of life issues to deal with. I'm now in my first proper holiday since and I'm happy to post a little bit more. In the past year, though, I've been posting thoughts on Twitter--as I did not have time to work on fu…

I will be moving home starting August 13th, 2017. Sklivvz.com will be temporarily hosted on Azure until I get a decent broadband at my destination. There might be disruptions and some other properties like intelligenthack.com will be down for a month or so. They are not that important at all. Thank…

Salvatore Sanfilippo, a.k.a. Antirez and Redis Labs just announced the release of Redis 4.0. One of the most prominent features is the support for modules, Redis extensions that can add commands available to clients. I've had the pleasure of working a bit with Salvatore for the past few months lear…

It amazed me the other day, when I commented on twitter in favor of AdBlockers, that there are still people believing the rhetoric that choosing not being subjected to ads is somehow cheating the system (and of course they'd tell you so by calling you a 4 year old, har har). How naïve can you be, pa…

I was asked on Twitter the other day how come it's not possible to comment on my blog posts. Here's a list of possible reasons, maybe it will make you rethink how useful comments are. Spam source This is the easiest-to-understand reason. If people write nonsense, or attack each other, or write s…

Last evening I had an interesting exchange with a @GeePawHill on twitter that went something like this: @GeePawHill: if a function involves a chain of objects, A -> B -> C -> D, and we satisfy ourselves, A works if B works. B works if C works, and so on... ..we have come very close to satisfying…

One of the things that absolutely inspired me in my tenure at Stack Overflow was remote work. In fact, I loved it so much that I chose it as an absolute prerequisite for my next job. Why do I love remote working? For traditional office jobs, it just makes much more sense. Why should people be force…