Tech lead and backend engineer focused on architecting and building secure and scalable services
This is one of the most common programming errors I see, and it's probably one of the least obvious. Sure, we want to protect our code from failure scenarios, but we need to be careful about it: there's such a thing as being too defensive in our codi...
Before we had the walled gardens of social media feeds, there was a wonderful time when sites published their feeds in an open format (RSS) that we could subscribe to, free from dopamine-inducing algorithms, creepy targeted ads, and privacy violation...
I'm done trying to fix technical debt. When we ask leadership to budget time for fixing tech debt that is holding us back, it's no longer a surprise that the answer is almost always no. Of course they prefer delivering value to users over obsessing a...
A significant challenge with code maintainability is understanding why the code is the way it is. This includes understanding the trade-offs that were considered, why certain convoluted parts of the codebase can't be simplified, and so on. That's wha...
There's been a long debate about remote vs on-site work. Some say remote is better because it cuts down on commuting and office costs and widens the talent pool. Some say it's worse because you miss the spontaneous hallway conversations, and maybe pe...
One of my principles for software development is “no surprises”. Things should be exactly where we expect them to be, and look exactly like what we expect them to look like. Code should do exactly what we expect it to do. When things are surprising, ...
When someone chooses a career, they go for the work they like the most, within their abilities. I know I did when I followed software development. And yet, you don't see many people celebrating Mondays and lamenting the end of the week. Not even clos...
Building web applications seems to be getting more and more complex. Abstractions upon abstractions, and fixes for problems caused by fixes for other problems. But does it have to be this way? There's a place for complex frameworks and architectures,...
Hi, I'm Ricardo Lopes, a tech lead and backend engineer. Welcome to my blog! This is where I'm sharing a collection of thoughts, experiments, wise advice from my mentors, notes on things I'm reading, and more. All views are my own and not of any empl...