Blog
Technical Interviews: We Can do Better
Hiring is very expensive for companies (and for candidates too); it not only takes a lot of employees’ time to go through multiple rounds of interviews with several candidates, but even worse, hiring a bad engineer - only to let them go weeks or months later - sets everything back, including morale. And yet, companies and teams spend a surprisingly small amount of time preparing good interviews. We’re hiring so that a candidate can be productive and have an impact after a certain number of days. The basic criteria are: “can get the job done and not be a jackass” (basically, most companies’ declared “values” reduce to these two). Not being a jackass means we can work with this person (e.g., they are not arrogant and are respectful). Getting the job done in a good, timely manner means they are smart, can learn, and have relevant experience.
June 21, 2025
What the F is DevOps?
Who knows? Whenever I’ve talked to a recruiter or hiring manager, often the first minutes are dedicated to explaining and scope what the role of the DevOps team is. Origin of DevOps Everybody knows this right? In the traditional way of working, there were developers writing code and sysadmins taking care of servers, doing operations. Software engineers would “chuck their code over the wall” to the sysadmins and these sysadmins would deploy the code. Developers want to make changes and sysadmins want stability (“if it works don’t touch it”) thus generating a conflict of interests. “Developer Operations” or “DevOps” was born to break down that wall, or so goes the legend.
October 31, 2024
Automation Is a Panacea
Panacea noun a solution or remedy for all difficulties or diseases. Obviously there are no panaceas, let’s downgrade it to “something that is good to do in almost all circumstances”. According to the first citation in Wikipedia: “Automation is the technology by which a process or procedure is performed with minimal human assistance”. For our sofware engineering purposes, we’d think of automation as a “script” or program that runs a series of steps that were performed manually before — see “infrastructure as code” for example.
December 21, 2023