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João Alves

@joaoqalves.net
72 followers 27 following 126 posts

2x Dad. Husband. Head of Engineering @Adevinta. Building abistama.com and rotahog.com Opinions are my own. Writes in PT/ES/EN/CAT

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João Alves @joaoqalves.net · 18/02/2026
Should engineering managers become hands-on again? If even 20% of what we’re seeing is real, productivity, speed, and cost structures will change. Leadership blind spots at inflection points are expensive. I think eng leaders can’t afford to find it out.
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João Alves @joaoqalves.net · 28/01/2026
🧵 Yesterday, after a discussion on Discord, and today with @sdepablos, I got inspired. AI is not just changing how software is built. It’s changing how the industry operated for years. The loop is: smaller teams → cheaper feature parity → margin pressure → labor shifts → capital reallocates. 👇
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João Alves @joaoqalves.net · 27/01/2026
After reading the article on software industrialization, this is my (current) take on Software Engineering + AI. Where am I wrong?
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João Alves @joaoqalves.net · 20/01/2026
“I already raised my concerns. If they chose to ignore them, that’s on them.” I heard it many times from Tech Leads. But this is not (tech) leadership at all. So... I wrote about it. 👇
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João Alves @joaoqalves.net · 13/01/2026
As a Tech Lead, “we need more speed” always comes up. Without KPIs, SLIs, and SLOs, that turns into opinions: “I think it’s fine.” // “I think it’s risky.” This is why Operational Excellence matters. 👇
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João Alves @joaoqalves.net · 09/01/2026
AI won’t break your company (yet?). It will expose slow org design, fragile delivery pipelines, and leadership habits that no longer scale. I wrote down what actually needs to change for CTOs running 100+ engineers. 👇
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João Alves @joaoqalves.net · 16/12/2025
I joined mytaxi as a Tech Lead in 2018 and quickly realized something uncomfortable: having good ideas and the title did not mean people would listen. What finally changed things was simpler. A small tool and sitting side by side with people, solving problems. Full article 👇
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João Alves @joaoqalves.net · 15/12/2025
“Why do you blog?” I learned most of what I know by watching great teams up close and trying to apply their habits in the real world. Writing is my way of passing that learning forward. Happy to see a positive impact.
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João Alves @joaoqalves.net · 09/12/2025
The Tech Lead role is among the most misunderstood in engineering teams. It’s not “the best coder”, and it should never be a bottleneck. I wrote a post on what good Tech Leads actually do, the signals to look for, and how EMs can better support them.
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João Alves @joaoqalves.net · 04/12/2025
¿Qué hace realmente un Tech Lead? Y, sobre todo, ¿cómo saber si lo estás haciendo bien? Hablo de arquitectura, calidad, alcance, principios operativos y del verdadero impacto de un TL: crear un equipo que toma mejores decisiones sin depender de él. 👇
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João Alves @joaoqalves.net · 02/12/2025
1/2 Considering the success of my article in Spanish, I’ve translated it to English: “When software becomes fast food” AI commoditizes code. So the bottleneck shifts and intensifies elsewhere (CI/CD, architecture, taste, judgment, etc.).
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João Alves @joaoqalves.net · 25/11/2025
I failed two promotion attempts even when everything “looked right” on paper. In a post-ZIRP world, doing great work isn’t enough. You need level n+1 stories, visibility outside your team, and impact across boundaries. Full article below.
Whiteboard sketch outlining three promotion mistakes: "potential" trap, competition favors proven experience, and visibility gap limiting cross-team trust.
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João Alves @joaoqalves.net · 24/11/2025
Nueva edición de “El doble clic” - Gestión de contexto en Claude Code, cómo Tinybird reforzó su infraestructura en entornos multi-tenant y mucho más. Aquí 👇 enespanol.joaoqalves.net/p/el-doble-...
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João Alves @joaoqalves.net · 19/11/2025
Doing active/active K8s setup is hard. In many cases — unless it’s a regional service with its own database, etc — it comes with a lot of hidden complexities. @tjamet writes about our experience at Adevinta doing it. Must read: medium.com/learnings-f...
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João Alves @joaoqalves.net · 09/11/2025
More updated than ever. 2020s engineering leaders must be more into the details. That’s a feature and not a bug. “Servant leadership” (misapplied) created a lot of peace time engineering leaders. Full post on world.hey.com/joaoqalves/...
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João Alves @joaoqalves.net · 29/10/2025
"538 microservices? What a mess." Four years ago, I wrote Disasters I've Seen in a Microservices World. I thought by now we'd have solved most of them. We didn't. We just learned to live with the chaos. Link below 👇
A graph showing how risk changes: too few services? monolith, and potentially problems when deploying. A lot of services? A headache too
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João Alves @joaoqalves.net · 28/10/2025
I've written a sequel to "Disasters I've Seen in a Microservices World," my most-read blog post. Ten disasters later, it's still chaotic, and with the rise of AI agents, it's bound to get worse. Planning to publish soon. Anyone want to read it before I do?
 Four years later, I'm still seeing the same patterns, just dressed in different frameworks, clouds, and YAML dialects. The tools evolved, but the fundamentals didn't: distributed systems remain distributed, humans remain human, and complexity remains undefeated.  What's coming next will make this even more interesting. We're now trying to build AI agents: autonomous, stateful systems that communicate with each other, make probabilistic decisions, and respond to unpredictable inputs. In other words: distributed systems with opinions. What could go wrong? The same fallacies apply, just at a different layer. Latency, consistency, observability, determinism. None of them magically disappears because the component now "thinks."
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João Alves @joaoqalves.net · 24/10/2025
Everyone talks about multi-cloud and reliability. Here’s what it looked like in practice when I joined Adevinta five years ago. The company had just agreed to acquire the eBay Classifieds Group, its secondhand marketplaces division. On the table: private cloud, GCP, and AWS.
Multi-cloud made it to the final spreadsheet, but only so everyone could see how crazy expensive it would be.  In the past, AWS and other hyperscalers had single points of failure. As @GergelyOrosz  mentions in the latest Pragmatic Engineer newsletter, there are still some components that are “global” and run on a single region (us-east-1). That’s not the norm, and the vast majority of services can be run in multiple areas. It’s up to the business to understand (a) what its critical paths are and (b) what its risk appetite is versus the cost of running multi-region or even multi-cloud/hybrid setups for specific scenarios.  For some businesses, 24/7 uptime is more critical than for others. Take Glovo or Uber, for example: there’s a high per-minute cost during peak hours. Why? The cost of switching is low. Users also have Lyft, FREE NOW, Just Eat, and Uber Eats on their phones, so they can easily open another app to get from A to B or order a meal.  If one of Adevinta’s portals (secondhand, real estate, or motors) is down at 2 a.m. on a Friday, that’s mostly OK. Yes, there are peak times, but there’s also a counterbalance thanks to (a) network effects — a lot of the inventory on @leboncoin  isn’t listed anywhere else; everyone in France uses it — and (b) low time sensitivity. If you’re looking for a flat or a car, it can wait a bit.  Multi-cloud (and sometimes even multi-region) sounds smart until you price it, model the risks, and realize: it’s usually not worth it. Reliability is an architecture problem, not a cloud problem.
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João Alves @joaoqalves.net · 22/10/2025
.@karpathy says the best way to learn is to build things. He’s right, but as engineers, we know that’s only half the story. Writing, teaching, or preparing a talk forces you to understand what you have built. That’s what this post is about. Link below 👇
Visualization from Jason Roberts with x-axis on "Doing" and y-axis on "talking". The best is the intersection between them
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João Alves @joaoqalves.net · 20/10/2025
LLMs changed everything for me. I got my first money on @hirotahog, thanks to it. Before I had lots of ideas but with my limited time, I threw the towel before I went live. Now I go from idea to prod quickly and I try a lot of stuff. FAFO
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João Alves @joaoqalves.net · 19/10/2025
At abistama.com, we’re cooking something new. 🧑‍🍳
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João Alves @joaoqalves.net · 17/10/2025
2025 is my "back to blogging" year! After 1.5 years of hiatus, I've written eight blog posts this year. The fun part for me? Talking about SaaS, Private Equity, being a Head of Eng, and more.
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João Alves @joaoqalves.net · 16/10/2025
I wrote a post, after @factorialapp's latest announcement: back in the office, five days a week 🔥 Remote is a tool, not dogma. Why? Juniors struggle, culture slips. Hybrid needs rules; remote edges, small teams. Tradeoffs. Full post below
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João Alves @joaoqalves.net · 11/10/2025
One of the comments I received in HN was this one. My post aimed at sharing my personal experience and not work-wise. Still, there are a lot of things to unpack.
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João Alves @joaoqalves.net · 09/10/2025
I also learned how to "ping-pong" with ChatGPT in terms of producing good PRDs and identifying areas where there are weak spots, such as tests. Read it here : bit.ly/48ieyVB
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João Alves @joaoqalves.net · 09/10/2025
I’ve spent three years "vibe coding" with LLMs. Shipping side projects I’d never have had time to build otherwise. In terms of implementation, I agree with @iagolast and I don't feel it's "magic" anymore, but I do feel a lot more productive. Full post below.
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João Alves @joaoqalves.net · 25/08/2025
I’m open sourcing Abistama’s support hero! 🦸 ⚡ Emoji → Jira tickets 🤖 AI-powered summaries 📊 CSAT surveys 🔗 Slack & Jira integration The biz model failed, but maybe it helps your team. Repo in the post below 👇
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João Alves @joaoqalves.net · 23/06/2025
The other day, I had the chance to have a conversation with @agilestateofM about DevOps, Platform Engineering, SLIs, SLOs and more. It’s meant for people that are start looking into all of this. >>>
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João Alves @joaoqalves.net · 16/06/2025
🚩"Not a 9-5 job" in a job post: is it a red flag? Some roles, such as those at OpenAI or Anthropic, require extra hours but offer career growth, equity, or a mission-driven impact. Effort can be a choice, not a trap, if the upside’s real. Read more: bit.ly/3HIJKlw
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João Alves @joaoqalves.net · 01/06/2025
One of Slack’s major moats is to have access to a stream of conversations in a business. AI and LLMs that build atop these and generate meaningful summaries, documentation, etc are a big threat to their business. Alas, new rate limits.
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João Alves @joaoqalves.net · 27/05/2025
Just published: "Five opinions I’ve kept, let go, and picked up as a software builder and leader" Typed languages, CD, writing culture? Still worth it. Scala? Test pyramids? Preprod parity? Not so much. New lessons? Support, momentum, brag docs. bit.ly/4mEzxXw
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João Alves @joaoqalves.net · 19/05/2025
What happens after a private equity takeover? Many things. The playbook is quite consistent. One of the main parts is replacing leadership with people more experienced or aligned with PE interests. If you wanna know more about Private Equities in tech, see the next post.
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João Alves @joaoqalves.net · 17/05/2025
The future has already arrived. It's just not evenly distributed.
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João Alves @joaoqalves.net · 24/04/2025
The MVP is live! Built a simple UI to assign tasks and track who’s up next for all-hands or newsletters. The fairness algorithm is in progress to stop the “always me” vibe. It’s rough, but it’s something. Any feedback?
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João Alves @joaoqalves.net · 18/12/2024
Three years ago, I suggested we trade off a mid/senior-level engineer for someone out of college. It was the best call I ever made. Today, we're equally sad this engineer is leaving the team and super excited because he'll join a top-notch AI company. Hire junior folks.
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João Alves @joaoqalves.net · 11/07/2023
The last point is where you can shine as a manager, after all the hard work before, setting the tone and culture for further promotions. Make the reasons for promotion public, and start a virtuous circle. What's your experience with promotions?
An image with a Slack message explaining to a team why engineer A and B were promoted. Spoiler: two different set of reasons.
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João Alves @joaoqalves.net · 11/07/2023
There are four points: 1. It starts with YOU. Vouch for promoting people for different reasons. Easy one. 2. Engage early on with your peers to get their support 3. Prepare for the calibration committees 4. ‼️ Make the reasons for promotion public. This is the game changer
2. Engage early on with your peers to get their support. Do you know the old adagio that there's a pre-meeting where the real afterward meeting gets settled? It's similar

3. Prepare for the calibration committees.
4. Make the reasons for promotion public. I strongly advocate for acknowledging and explaining why individuals are promoted. Culture isn't just about what's displayed on the walls. It's about what is encouraged, appreciated, and rewarded within the workplace. It's essential to recognize that there are multiple paths to promotion, encouraging diverse approaches to work and behaviors. That approach creates a positive cycle where employees understand that the management team values different skills and are less likely to imitate others to achieve success, such as prioritizing releasing high-profile features.
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João Alves @joaoqalves.net · 11/07/2023
In today's post, I'll briefly discuss my strategy to tame the usual "promotion-driven processes" born at big tech, which some companies emulate. How? Wait for the post in the afternoon 🚀 Stay tuned or subscribe in world.hey.com/joaoqalves
An engineer standing in an auditorium for his promotion. People clap him.
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