Should engineering managers become hands-on again? If even 20% of what we’re seeing is real, productivity, speed, and cost structures will change. Leadership blind spots at inflection points are expensive. I think eng leaders can’t afford to find it out.

🧵 Yesterday, after a discussion on Discord, and today with @sdepablos, I got inspired. AI is not just changing how software is built. It’s changing how the industry operated for years. The loop is: smaller teams → cheaper feature parity → margin pressure → labor shifts → capital reallocates. 👇

After reading the article on software industrialization, this is my (current) take on Software Engineering + AI. Where am I wrong?

“I already raised my concerns. If they chose to ignore them, that’s on them.” I heard it many times from Tech Leads. But this is not (tech) leadership at all. So... I wrote about it. 👇

As a Tech Lead, “we need more speed” always comes up. Without KPIs, SLIs, and SLOs, that turns into opinions: “I think it’s fine.” // “I think it’s risky.” This is why Operational Excellence matters. 👇

AI won’t break your company (yet?). It will expose slow org design, fragile delivery pipelines, and leadership habits that no longer scale. I wrote down what actually needs to change for CTOs running 100+ engineers. 👇

Si eres Tech Lead y tus métricas no cambian las decisiones, no te están ayudando. KPIs, SLIs y SLOs no van de medir más. Van de dejar de discutir opiniones y empezar a operar el sistema. Nuevo artículo 👇

I joined mytaxi as a Tech Lead in 2018 and quickly realized something uncomfortable: having good ideas and the title did not mean people would listen. What finally changed things was simpler. A small tool and sitting side by side with people, solving problems. Full article 👇

“Why do you blog?” I learned most of what I know by watching great teams up close and trying to apply their habits in the real world. Writing is my way of passing that learning forward. Happy to see a positive impact.

El otro día, un pequeño post de Félix López me inspiró. Los títulos no te dan influencia por arte de magia. Si eres TL y tu equipo no te hace caso, no suele ser porque tu estrategia sea mala. Suele ser porque aún no existe confianza. ¿Qué me gustaría haber sabido en 2018? 👇

The Tech Lead role is among the most misunderstood in engineering teams. It’s not “the best coder”, and it should never be a bottleneck. I wrote a post on what good Tech Leads actually do, the signals to look for, and how EMs can better support them.

¿Qué hace realmente un Tech Lead? Y, sobre todo, ¿cómo saber si lo estás haciendo bien? Hablo de arquitectura, calidad, alcance, principios operativos y del verdadero impacto de un TL: crear un equipo que toma mejores decisiones sin depender de él. 👇

1/2 Considering the success of my article in Spanish, I’ve translated it to English: “When software becomes fast food” AI commoditizes code. So the bottleneck shifts and intensifies elsewhere (CI/CD, architecture, taste, judgment, etc.).

Hoy os traigo un artículo sobre algo que a veces olvidamos: no debemos enamorarnos de la tecnología, sino de nuestros usuarios. Suena fácil y obvio, pero los equipos de ingeniería se olvidan a menudo de ello. open.substack.com/pub/esjoaoqa...

Bricks of Love: enamórate de tus usuarios, no de tu tecnología

Cómo las actualizaciones semanales pueden reforzar la cultura, el propósito y la empatía en tu equipo

open.substack.com

I failed two promotion attempts even when everything “looked right” on paper. In a post-ZIRP world, doing great work isn’t enough. You need level n+1 stories, visibility outside your team, and impact across boundaries. Full article below.

Nueva edición de “El doble clic” - Gestión de contexto en Claude Code, cómo Tinybird reforzó su infraestructura en entornos multi-tenant y mucho más. Aquí 👇 enespanol.joaoqalves.net/p/el-doble-...

Private Equity en tech: todo lo que siempre quisiste saber enespanol.joaoqalves.net/p/private-eq...

Private Equity en tech: todo lo que siempre quisiste saber

Qué es, cómo funciona y qué implica para quienes trabajamos en tecnología

enespanol.joaoqalves.net

Doing active/active K8s setup is hard. In many cases — unless it’s a regional service with its own database, etc — it comes with a lot of hidden complexities. @tjamet writes about our experience at Adevinta doing it. Must read: medium.com/learnings-f...

Cloudflare down creating this huge impact is a nice reminder of why I’m a happy shareholder since a long time ago.

“Meta evaluating AI fluency” is making people mad about micromanagement. Using metrics as prompts, not targets, can solve issues and boost performance. Like DORA metrics at Adevinta, AI fluency needs clarity. Full article: world.hey.com/joaoqalves/...

AI adoption needs light, not hope

As per last week’s rumors, Meta will judge employee performance based on AI skills. Nothing new. Other companies, like Zapier, have even published what they expect “AI fluency” for all new hires: Every time a company announces “AI usage dashboards,” people get mad. My timeline on X gets full of surveillance, micromanagement, and bullsh...

world.hey.com

Managing EN/ES accounts and blogs with diverse content is more challenging than I anticipated, but I’m really enjoying it. Tomorrow, I'll post about how Meta and others are measuring AI adoption and making it a requirement in performance reviews. Stay tuned!

Hoy lanzo “El doble clic” en mi blog. Cada semana compartiré lecturas, charlas y enlaces que me hayan gustado. Perspectivas de @paoramen.com, @eferro.net, @elwatto.bsky.social y más! Si te gustan la tecnología, los productos y las startups, ¡te interesará! 👇

El doble clic — Semana del 17 de noviembre

Ideas, artículos y descubrimientos de la semana

enespanol.joaoqalves.net

Mi tesis sobre la IA: abarata picar código y desplaza el valor hacia el criterio. Habrá mucho “software fast-food”, pero también una mayor necesidad de expertos que sepan diseñar, integrar y tomar decisiones. open.substack.com/pub/esjoaoqa...

Cuando el software se vuelve “fast food”

La nueva frontera no es programar, sino decidir qué merece construirse

open.substack.com

More updated than ever. 2020s engineering leaders must be more into the details. That’s a feature and not a bug. “Servant leadership” (misapplied) created a lot of peace time engineering leaders. Full post on world.hey.com/joaoqalves/...

On the AI Agents vs workflows, my mental model is a sports team. * An agent is like a player knowing specific skills (speed, dribbling, …) * A workflow is like a tactic, using AI agents to achieve a goal (eg, score)

Cloud/FinOps Pro Tip: run Claud Code on AWS Bedrock, as they have the models available. Two benefits: 1. Built-in access control with AWS and temporary credentials. 2. It contributes to your AWS expenditure/commitment, allowing you to leverage this cost for volume discounts.

Un poco a contracorriente: no todo el esfuerzo es tóxico. open.substack.com/pub/esjoaoqa...

El esfuerzo no es tóxico

Nota: Este artículo es una traducción al español del original en inglés, escrito por mí.

open.substack.com

“How do you write so many articles in such a short time frame? You must be using AI” Nope. I use Grammarly to (re-)write as I’m not a native English guy. I use ChatGPT mainly to create an illustration, as otherwise HEY World (my blogging provider) puts my photo on it.

"538 microservices? What a mess." Four years ago, I wrote Disasters I've Seen in a Microservices World. I thought by now we'd have solved most of them. We didn't. We just learned to live with the chaos. Link below 👇

I've written a sequel to "Disasters I've Seen in a Microservices World," my most-read blog post. Ten disasters later, it's still chaotic, and with the rise of AI agents, it's bound to get worse. Planning to publish soon. Anyone want to read it before I do?