Team America

Oct 08, 2020 • Marco Cecconi

Last month I described how Intelligent Hack grew from a personal project to a real company when we hired our first two "valued associates" Oded and Mariusz. That happened in January, but of course, we could not stand still, and by July, we had to hire two entire teams to cover the work we needed to …

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Guest Blog: Web Designers & Coding by Jin Yang

Sep 30, 2020 • Marco Cecconi

Preface from Sklivvz: I've known Jin for almost ten years and I've always admired him for being very effective in bridging the gap between pure design and practical implementations. He gets it. As a consequence, I've found myself sharing his blog over and over through the years. When I decided to ha…

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Company-wide Retrospectives

Sep 23, 2020 • Marco Cecconi

Good Agile teams routinely run retrospectives to identify problems and improve their process and team outcomes. It might have been an innovative idea 15 years ago. Nowadays, it is an everyday practice for teams to do so as it's an obvious and uncontroversial way of identifying and fixing issues in t…

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Welcome valued associates Oded and Mariusz!

Sep 16, 2020 • Marco Cecconi

In December, I shut down my previous startup Badgie because, in large part, my consultancy business was booming. I had no time to dedicate to a product, and it made no sense to continue, so I pulled the plug. I have not been idle since then: Intelligent Hack has become a thriving company, and we ar…

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The Italian COVID app is a terrible idea

Apr 25, 2020 • Marco Cecconi

The "immuni" app (or is it a bracelet?), and other apps like it being proposed in Italy right now, are a terrible idea. The basic sell is that they act as a "proximity alert," so you can practice social distancing only towards infectious people and not indiscriminately. They are also being sold as a…

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Shutting down Badgie, 2019 recap and 2020 plans

Dec 25, 2019 • Marco Cecconi

Sometimes life has its way, and you need to follow along. In March, I parted ways with Toptal and decided to take a little time off employment to try to build a startup. In the meanwhile, my idea was to do part-time consultancies to fund my startup. That is why I, with a couple of friends, decided …

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Announcing Badgie Migrator

Jun 18, 2019 • Marco Cecconi

Database migrations are a tool created to work better with databases, especially under agile development. Instead of having a database with a "fixed" schema, which is deployed rarely by merging manually with tools like Redgate's SQL Compare, variations are stored in numbered SQL files as schema or d…

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The tremendous power of economic factors

Jun 06, 2019 • Marco Cecconi

Why is it so hard to determine and change a company's development culture? The answer lies in how customs come to be and how we are biased not to see the economic factors shaping them. When we look at broad social trends, at the winners and the losers, the tendency is to personalize the merits and …

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There is no toxic negativity

May 20, 2019 • Marco Cecconi

There’s an excellent Medium post by Way Spurr-Chen that has been making the rounds on Twitter and LinkedIn titled “Rage Against the Codebase: Programmers and Negativity.” I think the article makes many good points about why programmers value negativity and the author posits two possible (admittedly…

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How Badgie plans to support Open Source

May 13, 2019 • Marco Cecconi

Badgie is an unconventional service because it is fundamentally a game, but for software development professionals. Being a game and appealing to a professional environment at the same time is a delicate balance which we hope to achieve through design and user experience. In this world-wide massivel…

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Hi, I'm Marco Cecconi. I am the founder of Intelligent Hack, developer, hacker, blogger, conference lecturer. Bio: ex Stack Overflow core team, ex Toptal EM.

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