Useful (and Useless) Metrics to Understand Whether Your Team Is Improving (or: how to measure without becoming a slave to numbers) There was a time when I truly believed metrics were the solution. The team was growing, the backlog was full, and we constantly felt like we were chasing something. As it often happens, the question was always the same: “Are we improving, or are we just running faster?” And as it often happens… when you can’t answer, you start measuring.

A strategy for building a team that doesn’t depend on “super-seniors” In many technology companies there comes a very specific moment when a fairly widespread belief takes hold: if we hire a very senior person, problems will finally start solving themselves. Sometimes that actually happens. More often, problems simply change shape — but they remain. This article is not against super-seniors. It is against the idea that a team should work only because of them.

Platform Engineering: what really matters and what is just hype In recent years, Platform Engineering has become one of the most overused terms in the technology landscape. Every company seems to want to “do platform”, often without having clarified what that actually means and, above all, why. As often happens, the risk is not the discipline itself, but its uncritical adoption: replicating patterns designed for very specific contexts in realities that have neither the scale nor the problems those patterns were meant to solve.

What I Learned Running HA Systems During the Holidays (Without Panic) Every year, as punctual as Christmas dinner or the New Year’s Eve toast, it arrives: the production incident during the holidays. Anyone who works with high-availability systems knows this well: for our services there are no office hours, no “closed for holidays”. And for years I’ve dealt with this from different angles: first as a sysadmin, then as a tech lead, and finally as a CTO.

Scalability, Sure… But at What Cost? The Real ROI of Distributed Architectures In recent years I’ve seen more and more companies chasing distributed architectures as if they were a badge of modernity: microservices everywhere, queues and streams for everything, three layers of caching, five different databases, and an architecture diagram that looks more like abstract art than an information system. The problem is that complexity always has a price. Not just in infrastructure, but in people, processes, incidents, and time-to-market.

Kind on Rootless Docker Does Not Work on openSUSE Leap Full analysis of the “Delegate=yes” issue and the definitive solution In this article I analyze a real case on openSUSE Leap where kind fails during the creation of a Kubernetes cluster using rootless Docker, showing the well-known error: ERROR: failed to create cluster: running kind with rootless provider requires setting systemd property "Delegate=yes" The message seems to indicate that Delegate=yes is not configured, but the real issue is deeper: cgroup controller delegation.