iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Galo Navarro @varoa.net · 04/08/2025

It echoes how during the pandemic the apparent impossibility to digitalise basic public services magically disappeared in weeks.

Galo Navarro @varoa.net · 26/07/2025

“[…] writing, which is the technology of the rational mind”

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Galo Navarro @varoa.net · 16/07/2025

One of the interesting parts about software engineering is that each domain you work in requires re-asessing every pattern and best practise that seemed set in stone in other domains.

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Galo Navarro @varoa.net · 12/07/2025

Must say it's been a lot easier to convince the AI to stop than the average human.

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Galo Navarro @varoa.net · 12/07/2025

I have Copilot (+ Claude) stuck in an infinite loop of refactors with small "improvements" to its own implementation of a relatively simple prompt. Feature parity with human devs is one step closer.

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Galo Navarro @varoa.net · 03/07/2025

Talent borrows, genius steals

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Galo Navarro @varoa.net · 03/07/2025

Listening to The Sonics' Hitch Hike, noticed that The Velvet Underground reused the riff in There She Goes, the Sonics were covering Marvin Gaye. www.youtube.com/watch?v=6-US... www.youtube.com/watch?v=KwyL... www.youtube.com/watch?v=QbW3...

youtube.com

Marvin Gaye Hitchhike

YouTube video by ron torres

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Galo Navarro @varoa.net · 04/06/2025

Galo Navarro @varoa.net · 28/05/2025

Warming up to this reading list enforced backupcy thing, thanks Pocket

Justin Garrison @justingarrison.com · 18/05/2025

Reposted by Galo Navarro

It takes you about the same amount of time to read this post as the amount of downtime you’d be allowed per week with 99.999% availability

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Galo Navarro @varoa.net · 17/05/2025

“One does not replace a blown fuse until one knows just why it has blown.”

Galo Navarro @varoa.net · 06/05/2025

Model versioning is starting to have a “project_proposal_final_FINAL2_revised_FINAL_v3_REALfinal.docx” feeling

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Galo Navarro @varoa.net · 01/05/2025

Lo del supply and demand con amigos es delirante! “Tan listo para unas cosas y tan tonto para otras”, que diría mi madre

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Galo Navarro @varoa.net · 01/05/2025

There are still 1980’s style sysadmin orgs that have survived by hiding behind the fancy labels of DevOps / SRE / Platform engineering

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Galo Navarro @varoa.net · 28/04/2025

Been inspecting some pmap outputs these days, and could not find any decent visualization tools. Here is a quick one (nods to @simonwillison.net toolbox). varoa.net/tools/pmap-v...

Screenshot of a tool to visualize pmap outputs.

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Galo Navarro @varoa.net · 27/04/2025

New small tool coding workflow: open vscode, agent mode, ask for tool, go do $chore

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Galo Navarro @varoa.net · 26/04/2025

I can relate I think it has a lot to do with speaking to a specific person and being able to rely on a concrete shared context.

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Galo Navarro @varoa.net · 23/04/2025

So em dash is the new delve?

Galo Navarro @varoa.net · 20/04/2025

Esto te lo moderniza el iluminado del pajarito azul con tres becarios en menos de un mes.

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Reposted by Galo Navarro

Adrián Mato 🐙 @adrianmato.com · 20/04/2025

The more we lean into vibe-based coding, the clearer it becomes that we’ll still need good operators to keep everything sane and under control

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Galo Navarro @varoa.net · 15/04/2025

this is not restricted to google products actually

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"Vibecode calendar app? [y/n]" is a great litmus test for "person who understands programming"

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-> Turn into bottomless rabbit holes for teams and entire organizations, at times when there was no practical reason for it.

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I'm not sure I'd advise solving that entire list of things up front. Pragmatism would tell you to fix those that you actually need, and at most have a plan for how would you address the rest. I say this because I've seen several points (e.g code structure, devops processes, modules boundaries..) ->

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I do see people obsess with finding Design Pattern as silver bullet. I generally agree with the article (gist: "be pragmatic"). Although IMO the conclusion dilutes the point ("go Modular-First" induces the same confusion on the reader: "oh here is a capital-P-Pattern I can apply"), plus ... ->

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Surfacing this from a thread.

Galo Navarro @varoa.net · 13/04/2025

I don't get the point with seeking a capitalized Design Pattern as a silver bullet. It's not the pattern you chose on day 1. Nobody can anticipate how a complex system will evolve over time. It's about consistently taking design decisions that optimize for ease of change, and adapt to new info

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Oh even further. There is no way to justify paying a human to produce boilerplate And the shift to higher value work (which I agree is more fun, but YMMV) is far from a clean 1:1 mapping of skills

Galo Navarro @varoa.net · 13/04/2025

There have been entire careers built on boilerplate

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I almost used Substack but it does not allow setting the canonical ref to your own domain which was a deal breaker for me

I have been doing the static thing (ghpages) to keep control of the overall site and crossposting to ghost, so far no complaints

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Queuing theory: probably the hardest topic to confine to work. brooker.co.za/blog/2025/03...

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Everything associated to the “software craftsmanship” mystique is up for surprises

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AI-generated code will choke delivery pipelines

When I wrote about "AI will choke delivery pipelines", no-Fri-deploys was one of the practises I mentally labelled as AI-unfriendly. Interrupting the flow of code on Fri creates a glut for Mon. And bundling changes tangles latent defects, making troubleshooting harder. varoa.net/2025/04/07/a...

varoa.net

Everyone is focused on the impact of AI on the production of code. Butcode isn’t just produced, it has to be consumed: built, packaged,tested, distributed, d...

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Galo Navarro @varoa.net · 09/04/2025

When bundling $thing2 into $thing1 looks like a good opportunity, that's the signal for NOT doing it. If they looked like bad opportunities overengineering & overscoping would never happen.

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Reposted by Galo Navarro

Brad Fitzpatrick @bradfitz.com · 09/04/2025

Anybody want to come work on Tailscale's internal dev tooling/productivity, CI, bots, dashboards, etc? Pretty please? 😅

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Galo Navarro @varoa.net · 08/04/2025

When the AI spits 200-400 lines of functiona code based on a prompt, forcing a whole commit, pr, test, [review], merge cycle is just too much friction holding people back. Screenshot is from my piece varoa.net/2025/04/07/a...

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Galo Navarro @varoa.net · 08/04/2025

I mention the DORA report in the piece I published today. The report has a page about AI impacting sw delivery negatively. The recommendations (screenshot) about smaller changelists and robust testing make sense, but I'm somewhat skeptical that they are viable ->

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Galo Navarro @varoa.net · 08/04/2025

The page about negative impact on software delivery performance landed right while writing this! varoa.net/2025/04/07/a...