Diego Pacheco Tech blog

The traditional management says that quality changes as we increase or decrease scope. That came from the traditional management triangle(Scope, Time, Price and Quality in the middle). This idea is completely wrong. Quality does not make us go slow, actually is the opposite, it makes as goes much faster. There are 2 important questions: A) Why do we need to go Faster? B) What faster means? Companies want to innovate, grow and increase revenue and market share, most of the companies today realized they won't achieve it with current mindsets, skillsets, and technology. So there is a rush for acquisition, companies need to acquire: 1) New Business Capability 2) Talent Density 3) Better ways to build digital products and innovate. However, there is something wrong. So for an unknown reason, we often are stuck in old mindsets like Only Deliver features, Follow Plans, Keep current process and Values. Great but what's the relation from the Business mindset with Testing. Testing is a...

OKR(Objective and key results) is the silicon valley approach for goals and strategic planning created at Intel around the 80s. OKR is not a prescriptive and complex method or methodology, OKR is a Go-To Philosophy which is super aligned with Agile.  Objectives in OKRs are a clearly defined goal followed by 1 or more key results that are specific and help to measure if we are achieving the goal. Key results can be measure in a non-binary way(did we achieve the goal? yes or no) but actually in a 0 to 100%.  Objectives need to be supported by initiatives. Activities help us to move forward and achieve objectives. OKRs become super popular at Google. I'm a fan of google in several aspects like Psychological safety, SRE and OKRs are definitely on this list. Google said OKR help them out to growth 10x. Who is using OKRs? Intel, Google, Slack, Netflix, Yahoo, Spotify, Twitter, Facebook, Amazon, LinkedIn, and several other silicon valley companies.

Building digital products are hard. There are many important and difficult disciplines that need to be cover in order to have a proper product. First of all, you need to have a product that people love(YC definition) and not only get the PMF(Product-Market-FIT) but also have proper engineering behind it. Digital products are very fresh and new compared with traditional software and projects. Since digital products are software, there is a push for delivery. Always was and always will be, which is fine don't get me wrong, however we often get half or even 1/10 of the picture. It's not only about software delivery but making sure we are building the right product and above all make sure we have customer impact with the right outcomes.

Rust is a kick-ass language. Many developers hate Rust because of borrowing and responsibility rules, I get it. However, these rules that make the language so appealing and much more efficient, check it out Discord use case , they migrated from Go to Rust. Today I want to show some nice things that the language offers to any engineer who wants nothing by the best performance. Rust syntax could be better? Yes, for sure. However syntax it's not what matters most. So let's get started, I made a video for us show in practice some cool stuff about Rust, I hope you like it.

Building Digital Products is HARD. Doing Hard things is hard but it's what we need to do. Mindset is everything. Teamwork it's critical to achieve true innovation and avoid silos. I Deeply believe it is Blameless culture and Psychological Safety environments. Trust is the foundation of any high performant team. However there is a tricky thing, you really want to have trust because you want to have people being able to DISAGREE. Disagreement is really important nowadays, it's like a network of layers and layers of testing. Everybody wants to succeed, more validations the better. Everything we do is complex, lots of different roles: UX Designer, UX Researcher, Lean BA, Discovery Architect, Delivery Architect, Foundation Architect, Agile Coach and much more. As we look to technology we have an explosion of languages, stacks, libraries, and frameworks just to have the right tool for the job, get the better performance and best user experience we can provide. Cloud computing i...

#NoProjects is an interesting movement driven by Allan Kelly . I follow Allan since 2015, I really like books. As humans, we tend just to add things up and we forget to remove, re-visit, re-cycle and re-think our values and mindsets. Effective Learning is also about unlearning. Project Myopia is a very interesting book on the matter. Projects are in the center of our universe, however, our universe should be customer-centric, product first and innovation-driven. It took me some time to realize how projects can be incompatible with digital products. Software is hard, products are even harder. Agile is all about Value, however, the IT Industry and digital product companies often have issues to define, measure and understand the value. Understanding and Seeking for value is really key to deliver better products and avoid waste(Lean).

Java still used for many digital product companies even today. Currently, Java is on version 13. Today I want to show how to use JDK13 with Gradle6 . JDK13 has some improvements on GC(as usual), minor new methods for Strings and IO and there are 2 interesting new Experimental Features. So let's get started.

This is a complicated matter. Every single company on the planet deal with estimates somehow and use some kind of estimates. There are people who are pro-estimate and belive giving an estimate is a professional thing and we need to do it and there are people who believe we need to reduce the number of estimates we do(I'm the second kind of people). Estimates often are wrong and incorrect. However, there are people who are really good on the estimate and get it right with very few error margins however when you look into details you might realize that being good on estimates might be killing your business. You might think is enabling you to sell more and get better but easily it could be the other way around, no worries I will answer why. This is a very hot and passionate topic so brace your self and let's go. Estimates are old, most of the time they are lies and they are not reliable however we continue to work with estimates expecting they will work when they dont work.