João Alves

In June 2018, I joined mytaxi (FREE NOW), a competitor of Uber in the ride-hailing space, as Backend Chapter Lead.

The software development industry during the 2010–2020 decade created roles such as Engineering Manager (EM) and Tech Lead (TL).

I’ve been thinking more about the Fizzy launch and the reaction around it.

Generative artificial intelligence has amazed the World.

Every time we talk about promotions and career paths, we listen a lot about how to get there.

As per last week’s rumors, Meta will judge employee performance based on AI skills.

When I first wrote about microservice disasters, I thought we'd eventually "solve" them, with better tooling, frameworks, and operational maturity.

This week, Dwarkesh Patel interviewed Andrej Karpathy and covered the future trajectory of Artificial Intelligence (AI).

A few years ago, I wrote that remote work was here to stay.

There's a massive hype about Large Language Models (LLMs) and Artificial Intelligence (AI), in general.

At Adevinta, Alex Moleiro initiated a project a few years ago in his Platform teams: instead of asking people, "Can you just create me a ticket?"

I'm a regular user of "BcnEng," a Slack workspace dedicated to Barcelona (software) Engineers.

Leading teams and building platforms across different contexts made me rethink.

On the build vs buy dilemma that software engineering leaders often discuss, I tend to stick with Peter Drucker's philosophy: Do what you do best and outsource the rest Twenty years ago, big tech had to invent everything from scratch, but today, some deve…

Note: I’ve translated this article into Spanish on November 20th, 2025.

Last year, I accepted a "Head of Engineering" position at Adevinta.

Leading Product engineering, Platform, DevEx, or other internal teams is very different.

Yesterday, I came across yet another article explaining how promotions work at big tech.

In many conversations, people ask me: “Why did you get into a management position?”.

In his book "Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us," Daniel Pink talks about "motivation 3.0", which comes after basic needs are covered ("motivation 1.0") and carrots and sticks ("motivation 2.0").

That's the question I ask myself when writing an essay or peer-reviewing a blog post for someone else.

In his book "Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder," Nassim Taleb explains that the opposite of fragility is not just resilience or robustness but rather a property he calls antifragility.

I first read about "servant leadership" in a job offer when I joined mytaxi (FREE NOW) back in 2018.

Each year there's an ongoing discussion about tech interviewing processes.

Over the last few years, companies put a lot of effort and money into developing their engineering management teams: one-on-ones, yearly goal setting, feedback, coaching, and whatnot.

Working for a startup with less than 50 people is a life-changing experience.

Every time people buy a new house, car, or TV, they say lovely things first.

The demand for Software development experts is still growing all over the world.

During the early 2010s, I was in college, and everyone in Hackernews was talking about two technologies: Ruby-on-Rails (RoR) and Heroku.

Yet another mobile application release halted due to a critical bug.