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In engineering, there is this rule of thumb about “one-way” versus “two-way” decisions. In a sentence: there are situations in which we can afford to experiment, fail, and roll back without much consequence beyond the time invested itself. These are two-way decisions. Other situations require much more scrutiny, because going back is not really feasible in context. These are one-way decisions. This paradigm for decision-making was famously championed by Jeff Bezos in Amazon’s 2016 Letter to Shareholders. Many decisions are, in fact, of the two-way kind, he argues, and their (ir)reversible character affects who gets to decide, how fast an organization moves, and therefore how quickly it can innovate and grow. I recently saw it very well explained in this interview with Matteo Ferrando, a fal.ai engineer. The general wisdom says that we should try to identify two-way doors as much as we can. ...

These days, virtually everyone leverages some work with AI. I have basically three levels at which I interact with AI, they correspond to how much I know about the process I’m trying to implement or the goal I’m trying to achieve. Coding agents get a lot of attention, but I still interact with AI a good deal via chat. The interface I choose depends on whether I want execution, understanding, or structure. ...

Open source contributions need not be great achievements. Actually, most of them are not, and that’s the way it’s supposed to be. In this paradigm, projects get better simply by being public and having people with different levels of expertise and involvement contribute to them. I recently contributed to a project that has allowed me to learn a good amount about networking. My contribution was eight lines of code. I admit that even if networking is something I already have some experience with and have been expanding my skills in recently, I don’t claim to be well versed in that specific project. Also, coming from a science background, I am fluent in Python and C++, and can understand, but not write much, Go (yet 😉). But I think that’s exactly the whole point of an open source contribution: we don’t need to be experts or hardcore programmers in the language a project is written in if we want to contribute. What we do need is the willingness to contribute, a problem to solve (or a feature to add), and the systems thinking needed to integrate it without breaking anything else (your PR won’t be merged otherwise anyway). This is even more true with the help of AI coding agents. ...

If you’ve read the tech news in the last few weeks, chances are you’ve encountered something along the lines of “HTTP adds the QUERY method”. You can go take a look at why that’s important, but I want to stop for a second on one of the properties of this method: all articles will say that QUERY is safe and idempotent. What does this fancy-sounding word mean? In one sentence: idempotence is the property of an operation that has the same effect whether applied once or multiple times. ...

My current workstation runs macOS, and I SSH into my Linux homelab. I use Raycast as an application launcher and a general productivity tool. Since I believe this hybrid setup (macOS + Linux) is fairly common, maybe what follows will be of use to you. I’m not a big fan of browser password managers, so I use pass instead. So far, so good. But there are two technical details that make my life easier: syncing passwords among hosts and having a keybind for quick access to them when I’m not in the terminal. ...

A couple of weeks ago, I spent one afternoon at this year’s edition of VivaTech in Paris, Europe’s largest startup and tech event. It wasn’t something I had planned. A friend of mine gave me a ticket at the last minute, so I arrived with little (no) preparation. Thousands of people, hundreds of companies (all sizes, niche and mainstream), in the one building I managed to visit. I’m not a great fan of big crowds, so it didn’t take long before I was already feeling somehow overwhelmed. So, I decided to take it easy: instead of trying to come up with an optimal plan in a hurry, I decided to just wander around or, as the French would say, flâner. And so I did. ...

In the last few months, I’ve been working extensively on my transition to Platform Engineering, and that includes my online profile. The very fact that you’re reading this means, I may modestly say, that it’s working! Today, a short write-up about a nice improvement to my GitHub Profile: automatically listing my latest blog posts. Since I use the Hugo Papermod theme, I had to make sure the site was producing an RSS feed. This is achieved by ensuring that hugo.yaml has RSS as an element of outputs.home. Additionally, I added the RSS icon to my header by adding the following element to params.socialIcons: ...

I am a lucky guy. I have a great family. I was brought up in what was still a moderately functional country: Venezuela. I received a good education and attended the best school I could back home. Then I left, did my studies and research in several countries, and eventually established myself in France. My departure coincided with the a major escalation of many problems that would lead to the worst years in the country’s history. I believe that most of those problems have their origin in the bad faith of some individuals, but we have also had our fair share of bad luck. This post is not about politics, though. ...

I keep a commonplace book on my GitHub. Commonplace books have existed since antiquity and persisted through modern times. They are simply personal notebooks where the author collects anything interesting or potentially useful. These notebooks serve the purpose of capturing a thought or an observation for future reference. I believe that, at their core, every learning or knowledge-production system implements some version of a commonplace book. Wikipedia says: They can variously contain notes, proverbs, adages, aphorisms, maxims, recipes, quotes, letters, poems, tables of weights and measures, prayers, legal formulas, and other professional references." ...

You docker run. You get containers with networking. It’s that simple. But is it? Under the hood, Docker creates network namespaces, virtual Ethernet devices, bridges, routing rules and everything else needed for containers to communicate. I’m following Drew Elliot’s Networking Course lessons; the first of which is mostly about how networking happens in containers. What follows is based on the notes I made during the course and revised on my own, including some concepts I wanted to revise. ...