Pablo’s Blog
The startup CTO dilemma
About 10 years ago I took my first job as CTO but I wasn’t a CTO, I just had the title. I was a developer with ambition. I made mistakes, very expensive mistakes, mistakes that contributed to the failure of the startup. Since then I have learned and grown a lot and...
Growth vs maintenance time
Someone asked me if I would have a property manager if I lived 5 minutes away from my rental property instead of across the Atlantic from it. Yes, of course I would! You have two types of time in your life: Free and Taken. Taken time is the one consumed by tasks...
Nicer printing of Rails models
I like my models to be printed nicely, to make the class of the model as well as the id and other data available, so, when they end up in a log or console, I can now exactly what it is. I've been doing this since before Rails 3 and since Rails projects now have an...
Editing Rails 6.0 credentials on Windows
Rails 6 shipped with a very nice feature to keep encrypted credentials on the repo but separate them by environment, so you can have the credentials for development, staging and production, encrypted with different keys, that you keep safe at different levels. For...
Talk to each other, you are missing out
For the past few weeks I've been talking to entrepreneurs, trying to help with their problems. I've heard both of these statements repeated a few times: Marketing is easy, but coding is impossible.Marketeers and Building a thing is fun, but then I have no idea how to...
The Voyager 1 museum
Voyager 1 is, as of now, 22 billion kilometers away from home. One day, we'll be a space-faring species and we'll have Voyager 1 in a museum. It'll be trivial for us to go and reach Voyager but we won't retrieve it. What's wonderful about Voyager 1 is not only the...
How can the price of oil or anything be negative?
The price of oil being negative is clearly a milestone of sorts, but $0 is not such a special price point. It feels special, it feels different, specially to consumers, but it's not. I won't explain why oil got so low. There's a mix of a pandemic going on, Russia...
Finding a co-founder for your startup
Update: this list is now being maintained on it's own page: Finding a co-founder Someone recently contacted me at MicroMentor with a few questions about their startup, including, how to proceed without a business partner. I told him he should probably find one and...
Converting a Python data into a ReStructured Text table
This probably exist but I couldn't find it. I wanted to export a bunch of data from a Python/Django application into something a non-coder could understand. The data was not going to be a plain CSV, but a document, with various tables and explanations of what each...
WordPress.com new editor handles titles right
I like my text properly formatted and with pretty much every CMS editor out there I always have some confusion when it comes to titles. The post or page has a title and then sections inside it also have titles and they are second level titles. On most CMS you have the...
Turning a list of dicts into a ReStructured Text table
I recently found myself having to prepare a report of some mortgage calculations so that non-technical domain experts could read it, evaluate it, and tell me whether my math and the way I was using certain APIs was correct. Since I'm using Python, I decided to go as...
Book Review: Scrum: The Art of Doing Twice the Work in Half the Time by Jeff Sutherland
I first came in contact with Scrum when I was working at Google and since then, I've been applying it to the startups I co-founded with good outcomes. Since I was searching for a job, I kept seeing "Scrum Master" come up over and over and I thought it was about time...
I’m writing a book…
Building and Managing Distributed Teams
In this book I distill the techniques and methods that I’ve been using and advising others to use to successfully run distributed teams and whole companies. This book will be short, to the point, tactical, and have tool recommendations.
If you are interested in the book, please let me know: