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.

The CTO and the Zen of Waiting How to Wait for People to Truly Learn In a tech world used to moving at the speed of deploys, we tend to assume that people should evolve at the same pace: new skills in a few weeks, new languages “learned” in a two-day course, new processes absorbed after a single meeting. Reality is different: people grow at their own pace, made of exposure, reflection, attempts, mistakes, setbacks, and new restarts.

Aligning the Technical Team with Business Goals: A Practical (and Honest) Guide Aligning the technical team with business goals is one of the most delicate, frustrating, and strategic responsibilities for anyone leading engineering. This isn’t a theoretical topic: it’s a daily struggle. It’s the recurring doubt of every CTO and Engineering Manager: “Am I communicating the right way? Am I truly conveying the urgency or importance of things?” Even I, after years of technical leadership, often feel like I still haven’t found the perfect formula.

Technical Debt: Understanding It, Managing It, and Turning It into a Strategic Advantage Technical debt is one of the most discussed (and misunderstood) concepts in the tech world. It’s not just about hastily written code or suboptimal choices: it’s a natural dynamic of software development that directly affects the speed, quality, and sustainability of team work. Understanding it is essential not only for those who lead the technical area, but for all C-levels involved in the company’s strategic decisions.

How I Choose a New Technology Without Getting Seduced by the Hype (Confessions of a pragmatic techie in a world full of buzzwords) Every year a new “revolutionary technology” appears, promising to change everything: 10x performance, infinite scalability, zero maintenance, flying unicorns, and maybe even a macchiato on the side. If you’ve been in tech for a while, you know how it goes: the hype cycle ignites, LinkedIn timelines explode, the sales team lights up… and you, who live between Linux, metrics, and late-night incidents, develop instant hives.