Blog on Paolo G.

Six words went out from Milan on the evening of April 24, 1945, and the war ended.

I skipped a couple of weeks of writing, again.

Before GPS, pilots estimated position from a known start, a heading, and elapsed time.

Why childhood summers felt longer than they were, why adult months disappear without a trace, and what I built to do something about it.

A Cambridge mathematician proved that a ‘one in a million’ event happens to each of us about once a month.

Alice didn’t fall down the rabbit hole because she had a plan.

I went from two blocks and a lunch break to a Mondrian painting.

Technical debt isn’t just “bad code”.

How does feedback control applies to teams and work?

In distributed systems, you pick two of three: consistency, availability, partition tolerance.

I spent my first months at AWS convinced I’d been hired by mistake.

Inbox Zero is exhausting.

You will never meet an alien.

The world upgraded but our mental models didn’t.

Life has no meaning.

Performance conversations go wrong when you prepare for the feedback but not for what comes after: the defensiveness, the ownership problem, and the follow-through gap.

I’ve been hiking lately, walking a lot, mostly on mountains.

Beyond money and titles, what really drives people to do their best work?

This is a slightly edited version of the message I shared with my organization on my last day at Amazon.

I’ve been thinking about whether to write this or not for a day or two.

Why perfectionism kills progress, and why shipping imperfect work beats waiting for perfect conditions.

I’ve done over 200 job interviews in just less than a decade, just as an interviewer.

I find math really interesting.

You might have noticed at this point that I have two main note storage formats: an analogic one based on a good notebook and a fountain pen, and ’note files’.

When I was in school, I was basically just told at some point to take notes.

Criminal Minds is enthralling: a bunch of gun bearing nerds with a private airplane fly to places to find serial killers by profiling their behaviour and personality.

I hear a lot of confusion around a bunch of words.

You might have heard of SMART goals.

Almost everything, in life, is some sort of game or choreography.

Three counterintuitive ideas: why being first locally beats global competition, how regret minimization drives better decisions, and the power of small consistent actions.

Life happens.

Let’s talk about todo lists.

You probably write emails.

Someone I know wanted to talk because they were very confused.

I’m always wildly curious about what people carry around to make their day easier, or just in case they need something in an emergency or in an unexpected situation.

I had a long day yesterday at work.

You might recall that exponential growth is really super crazy fast.

You probably heard it a million times: ’this is growing exponentially!’.

You can always summarize a job role into two bullet points.

I’ve been managing teams on and off for more than 10 years.

One Christmas morning – must have been more than 30 years ago – my dad produced a box.