Reducing Complexity Without Reducing Ambition: Practical Principles for Simpler Systems Because complexity is not an achievement it’s a warning sign. Complexity Is Not Competence: It’s a Warning In our industry, there’s a strange fascination with complexity. We worship it, justify it, and use it as a business card. As if creating something hard to understand were a sign of genius. Spoiler: it isn’t. A complex system is not a masterpiece. It’s an early warning often ignored that foreshadows slowdowns, bugs, rising costs, and increasingly sluggish decision-making.

The Three Habits That Keep Me Clear-Headed as a CTO Being a CTO is not a sport for the faint of heart. The really important decisions often arrive: with incomplete information, under pressure, in the middle of notifications, meetings, and technical surprises. For a while I thought the answer was “just work more and harder.” Then I realized something simple, but uncomfortable: If I don’t protect my mental clarity, I’m sabotaging my own work.

Incident Commander How to train and grow new Incident Commanders in your team When a serious incident happens, it’s not just about CPU at 100%, 500 errors, or exploding queues. There is always another factor at play: the team’s ability to stay clear-headed. At the center of that ability there’s a key figure: the Incident Commander. This article is for those who want to grow new Incident Commanders in their team, defining a training path that is clear, repeatable, and above all, human.

How to Build Antifragile Teams in Digital Chaos In a tech context made of tight deadlines, continuous releases, production incidents, and roadmaps that change every three sprints, the real difference is not made by the “perfect team” but by the team that absorbs shocks, learns fast, and comes back every time a bit stronger. This article aims to present a resilient and modern managerial vision, where the role of the CTO and team leaders is not to eliminate errors, but to design human and organizational systems that can metabolize them.

CTO and burnout: how to recognize it and react without losing clarity Being a CTO today means standing at the intersection of business, technology, and people. It’s an exposed role: you’re always “on call”, even when there’s no pager going off. The truth is simple and uncomfortable: clarity is a technical resource just like uptime. If it goes down, everything else follows: decisions, team, roadmap, strategy. In this article I’m speaking to you as a peer: someone who writes code, designs architectures, keeps an eye on cloud costs and, at the same time, carries home the meetings, team issues, and board expectations.

Automation doesn’t steal our jobs: it changes our craft (…and most of the time we don’t notice) Automation has become culture, not just a set of tools In recent years I’ve realized something simple but rarely said: we don’t just use automation anymore, we live inside automation. Once upon a time, adding a new script, a scheduled job, or a pipeline was “doing automation”. Today, without CI/CD, infra-as-code, and a minimum level of observability, a team doesn’t even leave the starting blocks.