Diego Pacheco Tech blog

In the summer of 2024, I wrote 300+ AI POCs; in 2 years, I have 550+ AI pocs. Before I cover the lessons learned, we need to address somethings. I've been learning technology for the past 23 years since I started working professionally with software; I never stopped. I always learned multiple languages every year and always liked to explore , even before AI. For 19 years(since 2007), I have blogged about technology. Before AI, I always believed that in the software profession, you need to know what you are doing in order to do it right. I learned languages that I would probably never use in production, just for the fun and sake of learning. I always believed that when you're too narrow in your current needs, you would miss the big picture and opportunities. YES, I always learn and research problems I was solving, but never confined myself to only short-term features. So I was doing POCs before AI, and I will do them after AI. Now we need to understand why POC are getting a bad ...

Many people think that today, Gen AI is the revolution of the machines. That AI will make an engineer 3-5x more productive. Well, that’s not true and not even close to being true. Let’s pretend it’s true for one moment, then we can apply some scale economics to Generative AI, especially with AI coding agents like Claude Code or OpenAI Codex.   Let me be honest: I don’t think that using AI you can get 3-5x the productivity from engineers right now. There are so many things I need to debunk here; it’s even hard to choose one to start with. But for a moment, just. For the sake of argument, let’s believe it's true(just for a moment). That will help you to understand why AI has suddenly become so appealing to companies.

One common mistake engineers make is to test mocks. However, would you know what the right principles are and how to spot good or bad tests according to these principles?  IF you don't have first principles, you are very likely shooting into the dark.  In Brazil, we have this metaphor that if you play chess with a pigeon (I will use a chicken in this post), you will very likely lose because the pigeon does not know what it is doing and probably will be upset with you for whatever you say. People say if you truly know, you know how to explain. Well, I will go further and say IF you truly know you extract first principles and explain with those principles, so your explanation is short, concise, and direct. Otherwise, you are a chicken on a chessboard just doing random things you don't fully understand.

  Professional players spend a great part of their careers on training. A top football performer for sure will spend 4-6 hours per week in training. Why, as engineers we dont practice? Yes, perhaps we go to university and get a degree, but what happens after that? Many engineers need to get used to doing POCs(Proof of Concepts) on their own time, or read books or writing down thoughts in the form of blogs, or simply organizing ideas in the form of diagrams and presentations. IMHO this is a big mistake, especially in the critical times we live in where there is a pandemic, recession, war, and things are difficult all around the globe. Over my career in software, I never stop learning. I dare to say that software engineering is not about typing but learning. Learning is the bottleneck; learning is the gap. Learning is a key skill that modern and well-rounded engineers must have. You can do many things, simple things that can start small but, with discipline and repetition, will pay o...

People asked me, what do you think about university and education, how do we know what we should learn and how to prioritize our studies? All valid and taught questions. For most Brazilians, the university does not make sense. I get it why, because when you join the workforce, you see very few usages for the skills or subjects you were looking at university. So I believe there is a list of 5 essential aspects you need to consider before deciding to drop out(IMHO you should not drop out). So what are five elements I'm talking about: What is your goal? What makes you happy? Where do you want to go? Short vs. Long term No Boddy knows the future. Education vs. Learning Let's go trought them one by one. But before I went there, you need to keep in mind that this is your life, it's your call and ownership at the end of the day, beware that nobody can answer this questions to you. Coaching and mentorship can deftly help you as you are starting your career or just piv...

That's not the first time I write about writing . I recommend logging to Several friends of mine, not only because they are studying and doing interesting but because they experience matter. In my previous post about writing , I was explaining why blogging is super important for remote work and learning. There is a great relation with Blogging and Remote work with I capture here and here .  However, for this blog post, I want to capture other aspects that go beyond the basic reasons like Marketing and Personal-brand. So why you should consider blogging? There are lots of good compelling reasons for it. So Let's get started!

POCs(Proof of Concept) is a standard tool in any software architecture belt.  Lots of people just play with some standard APIs all call it POCS, thats not POC. In order to have a POC you need to establish a goal or concept you want to prove that it works. Calling an API could be a POC? Well, most of the cases not assuming the API works and ins straightforward. However, if the API is hard to call or you need to do complicated things that are not straight forward a simple API call might be a POC. Today I want to share how I do POCs, what kind of POCs I do and how I managed to be effective with them. So I believe this is an interesting subject because most people I know barely do POCs and I do a lot. So Let's Get Started!

In this post i will show how we can have a machine learning environment with python and scikit-learn  in Vagrant . Python is a great language however use it in windows is hard because most of libraries might now work property so something is easier just provision a environment with Vagrant and them do it in Linux - thats what we goona do. This is pretty straight forward you just need to have vagrant installed and configured before we start.

We are this idea in IT thats just one kind of learning. This IDEA is wrong. We also associate 100% that FUN = LEARNING. So if we are not having fun? Are we learning? Some people could say no - worst than that - they give up - so if its not FUN i wont pay attention, i wont continue because clearly i`m not learning anything. Some activities like CODING its cool, its fun and for sure you sometimes i dont see the diference between work and fun and learning they all look like the some thing.  Thats amazing but not only with FUN the man lives :-) Most of my BIGGEST learning came from my BIGGEST failures, stress and NOT FUN at all moments. There is no single person in this world that does not suffer. Everybody suffer.  Some people suffer more than another ones but suffering does not make difference between the poor or the rich, the old or the new, the cool or the boring, the manager or the coder.

Learning is very important. Companies dont pay attention on this. All training activities are so old fashion and people are wasting a lot of create skills because people are just working but they are nor learning. So this is the first thing to me, work is about learning if you are not learning you are not working you are just being a machine and belive me a bad one because machines can do better repetitive task them us.  There are always a chance to learn something, the problem is that people dont make time to this, instead they are always using the same old tools and approaches. Because is easy an often people feel good to be in the comfort zone, i few awful if i dont learn something new every week actually i got sick.