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 …
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…
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…
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…
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…
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 …
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…
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 …
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…
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…
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.
After years of building, our top-notch consultancy to help start-ups and scale-ups create great, scalable products, I think it is high time I added an update to how it is going and what's next for us.
Software engineers go crazy for the most ridiculous things. We like to think that we’re hyper-rational, but when we have to choose a technology, we end up in a kind of frenzy