If you’re going to judge someone’s work, you owe them clarity. Set expectations upfront and be consistent. Grading work without a clear rubric is a joke. It’s unfair and meaningless. Without standards, nitpicking after the fact is nothing but a power trip. Evaluations should help people improve, not feed your ego.

Learn to accept risks and live by them. Removing every possible risk results in bland, uninspired work that aims to offend no one. De-risking everything makes you ship average shit. The fear of failure and making mistakes leads to a culture where safety and mediocrity become the norm. You’re left with something so sanitized that it fai...

If you find something broken, ask 'why' instead of 'who'. Then, fix it and move on. 'Who' involves blame and diverts energy from progress. Instead of indulging in ego, channel your efforts into the repairs. Taking responsibility in silence is a testament to leadership and sets a precedent for others. Progress doesn't need a spotlight; ...

I’ve never met anyone who burned out from working too much on something they love. Burnout isn't about the hours. It’s about the soul-crushing feeling of being undervalued and overwhelmed by things that don’t matter – the bureaucracy, the finger-pointing, the lack of autonomy, and endless processes. Passion does not fade from fatigue; ...

You weren’t hired to be a menu; you were hired to make things happen. Presenting multiple solutions to every problem doesn’t move things forward; it just creates noise and unnecessary debate. If you’re at a restaurant, options are great. But when you know the best approach, offering bogus choices is just plain stupid. You know what to ...

“Prove me wrong, and I’ll change my mind” is a shitty approach. Teamwork isn’t about winning arguments or proving points. It’s about collaboration, trust, and mutual respect. When you set up a discussion with the premise of proving someone wrong (you included), you’re creating a hostile environment. It’s combative, not cooperative. It ...

"It will just take you five minutes" is one of the most toxic lines you can hear. Nothing ever takes "just five minutes". You might spend the time tweaking a color or writing a line of code, but work doesn’t happen in a vacuum. There are context switches, interruptions, back-and-forth discussions, and, more importantly, the mental over...

I take everything personally and don’t trust anyone who says they don’t. It’s either a lie or a sign that they don’t care enough. Emotional detachment is often seen as a strength, but it’s also an excuse for mediocrity. Taking things personally goes beyond emotional involvement. It’s a testament to commitment and authenticity. It shows...

Standards made sense 100 years ago. Efficiency and consistency were vital then. Today, they often don’t fit. You need strict standards to build a plane, but Rock wouldn’t exist if Chuck Berry hadn’t tried the unconventional. Stiffness leads to bureaucracy, boredom, overthinking, and predictability. It can get you ISO-certified if that’...

When you get into a new car, you adjust the seat. Most people raise it to see the hood and the nearest part of the road. It feels like control. But we all ignore that raising the seat reduces our field of view, and we see less of what's on the road far ahead. Life's the same. Elevating your status may give you a false sense of security...

Setting office hours is a pretentious practice from the nineteen-twenties. It’s an attempt to seem accessible while dictating when you can be bothered. Your team doesn’t operate on your clock, and your office hours are just another way to say your calendar is more important than them. Leadership is about being available and present, re...

We’ve been duping ourselves, believing that packing a virtual room with faces on a screen every week fosters inclusivity, collaboration, and productivity. Yet, often, particularly in distributed teams, sync meetings devolve into grids of nodding heads, with only a few voices leading the conversation. The problem is not the meeting itse...

There's a narrative in tech companies that often goes untold: "Open product feedback." It's a tale of transformation. Not the kind celebrated in startup blogs, but the kind that slowly eats into the company itself. A vibrant and innovative culture turned into an over-calculated shadow of its past. Imagine a young startup unburdened by ...

The "Most Respectful Interpretation" model has sneaked into the remote working culture. It explains that you are supposed to interpret every message in the best possible light, believing the sender had only the best intentions. While at its core, MRI aims to foster a positive environment by encouraging people to assume good intentions ...

Over the past few days, I watched “The Days”, a Netflix series about the 2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster. Far from flawless and clearly inferior to HBO’s Chernobyl, it is still well-produced and manages to seize your attention and keep you locked in the seat. Besides just recounting the events, portrayed from the view of the plant mana...

Many times, we become victims of our own choices. Not just the bad ones, but even worse, the choices that stick around well past their expiration date. We become hostages to the 'business as usual' mentality, a cognitive straightjacket that stifles change and breeds complacency, and all those stubborn bad choices that we can’t just see...

Not all learning has to be confined within classroom walls or follow a rigid checklist. Often, the most valuable lessons emerge as we venture off the beaten path. As someone who embraces “Experiential learning” – learning by doing and making mistakes – my approach differs from the traditional method of lectures, readings, and exercises...

One of the most exciting (yet obscure) changes with iOS 16.4 is the @backDeployed attribute in Swift. @backDeployed will allow you to mark certain functions or properties as backward-compatible. When using it, the Swift compiler generates code that checks at runtime whether the feature is available on the target device. If not, it will...

AI blowing us away with its superhuman abilities is cool, but that's the tip of the iceberg. The real magic of AI, especially in search, is its availability and affordability. With traditional search engines, you still have to dig and check a few sites before finding what you're looking for. This helps ensure the source is trustworthy ...

While it might be tempting to go for the cheapest option, when it comes to your work tools, it's not worth it in the long run. Tools are an investment. Putting your money into something that will last, and help you do your work faster, will save you time, money, and frustration in the long run. Buying cheap things means you'll likely e...

Let's assume you lead a development team and you're given the following list of priorities. Next year's priorities: • Improve app stability • Improve app performance • Improve app accessibility • Update the app's UI design • Remove low-usage features • Improve Quality Where would you start? — Does that mean you have to do all of that n...

As I was walking around downtown the other day, this graffiti caught my eye. Roughly translated, it says: Empathy saves… Empathy saves lives, situations, whales, oceans, relationships, wishes, thoughts, homes, families, friends, ideas, bees, cyclists, pedestrians, poems, kisses, conversations, hugs, breakfasts, bakeries, companies, son...

Here are a few links to the blog archive: 2022 • Moving out of WordPress • A plan is not a strategy • A/B testing your app icon • We’re not saving lives here • A/B test your design, not your product 2021 • Live preview for your UIKit views • Hello Spain! 🇪🇸 • Writing a Networking Library with Combine, Codable and Swift 5 2020 • Getting...