The other day I was doing a code review and noticed that a mechanism for i18n was added to a new project we’re working on. There was a line like this:

1
2
3

{ key: 'something',
  label: i18n.t('something'),
  value: i18n.n(user.salary, 'currency')}

This is very simple and common I’d say. Even so I left, as I so usually do, a suggestion as a comment:

Suggestion: wrap i18n.t and i18n.n in an abstraction that we control.

I met Gonçalo Sequeira at a previous company we worked at. He recruited me and because of that I got to interact with him during my full recruitment process.

I learned a lot with him. Soon after he left to boot Mercedes-Benz.io development’s hub in Portugal and I’ve been following his career and still trying to learn from him.

In this interview we cover what’s like to start a development hub, how to recruit the first people and what’s important about them.

These are my replies to my first AMA (ask me anything).

It’s interesting how this made me think and clarify many ideas. I’ve left the AMA format open and added the Ask me Anything page that has instructions on how to receive more questions.

On this interview I give my opinion on several topics regarding engineering management, problems I’ve faced and how they changed me, how to measure performance, how to organise my time and about leadership.

I don’t consider myself a gamer, but I like to play some games from time to time. I usually like games where I need to manage a squad, that have tactical and strategic depth. Sometimes I say that this helps me being a better manager.

It’s not that in my day-to-day affairs I gain from the experience of leading virtual heroes to battle. But I do face new and weird challenges on those games, and sometimes I can correlate to the real world.

An exercise I like to do is to try to categorize the typical day to day tasks in terms of the time frame they are responding to. I actually feel that this says a lot about the company’s culture and way of working.

From this point of view, a task can be:

• Reactive
• Proactive
• Forecasting