I just saw this article on The Verge: Let me start by saying that I am not a fan of chatbots as the primary user interface for enterprise systems. Although LLM-backed tools are significantly better at detecting intent and making data more useful, as a survivor of the fever dream … | Continue reading
As I learn more about the current renaissance of Artificial Intelligence for something I am building (more on that at the end), I find myself reading and re-reading papers that talk about how to consume and make sense of information at scale. All this talk about managing informat … | Continue reading
As I recently wrote about here, I have left DigitalOcean after almost two years building the Product Engineering organisation there. I didn’t have any immediate plans about what would come next, but luckily my roll-off period was calm enough, and in the past month I was able to … | Continue reading
Since their first introduction many decades ago, we learnt that distributed systems enable use cases we couldn’t even think about before them, but they also introduce all sorts of new issues.When these systems were rare and simple, engineers dealt with the added complexity by min … | Continue reading
About 20 months ago, I joined DigitalOcean in their New York City headquarters. As i wrote about in a blog post, it was a super exciting opportunity. After so many years building infrastructure for products, I would be joining a small company where infrastructure is the product.A … | Continue reading
In May 2017, I gave a talk at Craft Conf in Budapest focusing on the economics of Microservices. You can watch the video recording here or read through the slides here. In this talk, I have briefly discussed a set of proposed prerequisites for microservices, which are the things … | Continue reading
I’ve spent some time talking about the very basics you need to have in place before thinking about going down a microservices route, but even if you have these in place that doesn’t mean that you aren’t going to find some new surprises. Microservices impose a very distributed arc … | Continue reading
Note: This is an essay I wrote as the basis for a talk I’ve given for GOTO Chicago in February 2017. You can find the original slides here.In the late 90s and early 2000s, this industry was obsessed with what is usually called “distributed objects”. I believe that this came to be … | Continue reading
At DigitalOcean, we are making some changes to the recruitment process of back-end developers. We simplified the job description and the interview process, and added a step that asks the candidate to write us some code. This is an account of my experience on hiring processes and … | Continue reading
At DigitalOcean, we are making some changes to the recruitment process of back-end developers. We simplified the job description and the interview process, and added a step that asks the candidate to write us some code. This is an account of my experience on hiring processes and … | Continue reading
Back in August, I’ve decided to leave SoundCloud. This wasn’t an easy decision. A bit more than four years ago I had the opportunity to join a mission-driven startup as one of its early engineers, and eventually lead the organisation as it grew from 20 to more than 120 engineers. … | Continue reading
When I was at SoundCloud, being transparent about our architecture evolution was part of our technology strategy. Something we’ve talked about on countless occasions but never really described in detail was our application of the Back-end for Front-end architecture pattern, or BF … | Continue reading
Microservices are a thing these days. When I was at SoundCloud, I was responsible for the migration from a monolithic Ruby on Rails application to a constellation of microservices. I’ve told the technical side of this story multiple times, both in presentations, and as a multi-p … | Continue reading