The Curious Engineer

All blogs / Software / engineering practice

~fpereiro

federicopereiro.com

Software / engineering practiceEngineering management / careersAI / MLEssays / personal

’15’20’25
Posts
235 from 9 Jul 2012 to 15 Oct 2026
Posting
weekly (75 in the last year)
Kind
personal blog
Feed
https://federicopereiro.com/feed/

2026 62

  1. Understanding certificate authorities
  2. Clients are orchestrators
  3. Putting a modern Mac on DFU mode
  4. No confusion
  5. Four layers of crutches
  6. My habit structure at 41
  7. What I’m learning from Argentina during this World Cup
  8. Github is my publishing house
  9. The Netherlands as a structure preserving structure
  10. Fast legacy
  11. Your project needs development notes
  12. Team members as abstraction + computation
  13. Choice and ownership
  14. Invariant testing
  15. The four horsemen of data
  16. Rocket to nowhere
  17. LLMs are not an acceptable high level language
  18. Every app is social unless proven otherwise
  19. Security is still a function of the complexity of the system
  20. What the AI bubble got right
  21. What generative AI is good at right now
  22. Don’t look out there
  23. The alternate privileged generation hypothesis
  24. Atom Earth
  25. My priorities as an eng manager in April 2026
  26. Signal vs noise in interesting times
  27. Social democracy shall inherit the Earth
  28. The work trinity
  29. Thoughts on language
  30. The bitter lesson and physics
  31. Our job is to understand
  32. LLMs as clay
  33. Dodecaphonic solfege
  34. Thinking about the cost of inference
  35. Coding guidelines as libraries
  36. Vibe dieting
  37. Outreach is like working out
  38. Literate clanking
  39. The perfect sleep
  40. My coding agent is better than yours
  41. Surface testing with LLMs
  42. Youtube is a good place
  43. Distance vs speed in running
  44. Drinking with beauty
  45. Notes on Tooze – The Wages of Destruction
  46. Four magics
  47. Quality and understandability after AI
  48. A Ralph in the loop loop
  49. Notes on Kim & Yegge – Vibe Coding
  50. Clanking out
  51. LLMs as the new high level language
  52. Don’t talk sh*t about Bryan
  53. Writing syntax
  54. RAGs and tools and bellyaches
  55. Innovation has to be really good
  56. Money as platformized debt
  57. A substitute for thinking
  58. The progress formula
  59. The Kahn factor
  60. How to Claude Code
  61. A business is a self-sustaining reaction
  62. Unifying the end of the year

2025 65

  1. Text is language
  2. Rationality takes guts
  3. Tradeoffs are the start
  4. Subhuman at your peril
  5. Lookups kill intuition
  6. I get types now
  7. A quick theory of system complexity
  8. Simplicity requires ownership
  9. Take advice from builders
  10. Caching is better than mocking
  11. Why I don’t like graphs for thinking
  12. How to do the impossible
  13. Some ideas for an effective socialism
  14. My three problems with type systems
  15. Sunsetting crashes
  16. Morale burn rate
  17. x times y
  18. The reward of risk
  19. The 18×5 block
  20. Startup baseball
  21. LLM first as neural sedentarism
  22. AGI representation and will
  23. Cruelty as anesthesia
  24. The suspicion
  25. Types and tests and console.logs
  26. Joy and power (then trust)
  27. Misfit and smooth fit
  28. Simple is vulnerable
  29. Speed of movement and speed of fire
  30. The two saving graces
  31. The sequence of four
  32. Why I run
  33. LLMs are the new computers
  34. Beyond brute force evolution
  35. Planning and living structure
  36. LLM outputs need probabilities
  37. Machine, platform, language, not application
  38. Being fat is a trap
  39. Why most old data systems were better than today’s
  40. Make abundance happen
  41. A long-term archiving medium
  42. Some tips for off-race ultra running
  43. Open AI
  44. The qualities of a technical leader
  45. The Ancient Startup
  46. Amortality is uncomfortable to contemplate
  47. Notes on Fustel – The Ancient City
  48. The 80/20 bins
  49. This is it
  50. Things I learned from Bryan Johnson
  51. Don’t say you are nontechnical
  52. Morality as consistency
  53. Text based productivity
  54. Software is the new hardware, LLMs are the new software
  55. The invitation
  56. The three values
  57. Seek validation not recognition
  58. Entrepreneurs are steppe peoples
  59. Setting up multiple HTTPS nodes with a LB in front
  60. Incentives rule
  61. Two more thoughts on LLMs
  62. Don’t use people
  63. The Reverse Murphy’s Law
  64. Notes on Harari – Nexus
  65. Three thoughts on the summer of AI

2024 11

  1. A tip for cold water dipping
  2. A righteous mob is still a mob
  3. Bold, kind, lazy
  4. Surface testing
  5. Thoughts on the edge
  6. Devops as a startup derisker
  7. Four Things I Did Differently When Writing a Frontend Framework
  8. Summary of actions from The Art of Less Doing
  9. On Simplicity and Understanding
  10. Why Redis is beautiful
  11. The appeal of fascism

2023 4

  1. 100x
  2. New leanup experiment: the sauerup
  3. Phenotypic evolution
  4. Notes on Clarke-Fields – Raising Good Humans

2022 26

  1. Failed leaning up experiment & new experiment
  2. Experiment: a moderate leaning up protocol
  3. Notes on Burkeman – Four Thousand Weeks
  4. From 20% to 10% body fat: summary
  5. Notes on Meisel – The Art of Less Doing
  6. From 20% to 10% body fat: week 16 report
  7. From 20% to 10% body fat: week 15 report
  8. From 20% to 10% body fat: week 14 report
  9. From 20% to 10% body fat: week 13 report
  10. From 20% to 10% body fat: week 12 report
  11. From 20% to 10% body fat: week 11 report
  12. Murphy’s Law Applied to the Sleep of Parents of Young Children
  13. From 20% to 10% body fat: week 10 report
  14. From 20% to 10% body fat: week 9 report
  15. From 20% to 10% body fat: week 8 report
  16. From 20% to 10% body fat: week 7 report
  17. From 20% to 10% body fat: week 6 report
  18. From 20% to 10% body fat: week 5 report
  19. From 20% to 10% body fat: week 4 report
  20. From 20% to 10% body fat: week 3 report
  21. From 20% to 10% body fat: week 2 report
  22. From 20% to 10% body fat: week 1 report
  23. Challenge: from 20% to 10% body fat in 16 weeks
  24. Notes on Clear – Atomic Habits
  25. An idea to stop incoming asteroids
  26. Yearly review – 2021

2021 12

  1. Notes on Walker – Why We Sleep
  2. Notes on Foer – Moonwalking with Einstein
  3. An idea to read literature in languages you semi-understand
  4. Notes on Seinfeld on Ferriss
  5. Notes on Acosta & Hutchison – The Happiest Kids in the World
  6. Notes on Roth – Breaking Free from Emotional Eating
  7. Don’t fight the system
  8. Notes on Lorayne & Lucas – The Memory Book
  9. An owl’s morning
  10. Yearly review – 2020
  11. Quarterly review – Q4 2020
  12. Notes on Jasny – Soviet Industrialization (1928-1952)

2020 17

  1. Quarterly review – Q3 2020
  2. Quarterly review – Q2 2020
  3. The dawn of econology
  4. How to be less distracted
  5. Quarterly review – Q1 2020
  6. A conversation with Jeremy Jung
  7. Notes on living creatively
  8. A bulletproof day-starting routine
  9. A 12-week challenge
  10. My goals for 2020
  11. No exit
  12. Body fat is debt
  13. Be a maker, not a doer
  14. Work, not jobs
  15. Clues from Blue’s Clues
  16. Technical debt
  17. Why I use ES5 Javascript

2019 4

  1. Some notes on habits
  2. No mountains of the dead
  3. C++ is to C as ES>5 js is to ES5 js
  4. On software simplicity

2018 6

  1. My notes on learning React
  2. Asymptotic software
  3. Running a user script through cron
  4. Notes on setting up EC2 Autoscaling
  5. A restatement of the manifesto
  6. Frontend patterns

2017 5

  1. Hard, simple, rewarding
  2. A Manifesto for Progress in the Twenty-First Century
  3. Building your own frontend framework
  4. hexnot: an experimental musical notation
  5. Two months into 2017

2016 11

  1. My goals for 2017
  2. The double life
  3. How I stopped hating code testing
  4. The reducer: a new agile role
  5. Reconsidering declarative programming
  6. Programming is making things
  7. Debugging, explained
  8. Millions of users, thousands of paying users
  9. Write your own
  10. Instead of the news
  11. Heuristic definition of an expression

2015 6

  1. Learning Russian with third rate ideas
  2. Use fixed package versions in node.js projects
  3. Solving the type detection problem in javascript
  4. The 80/20 principle applied to diet
  5. Creating DSLs with javascript object literals
  6. The SELECT problem in redis

2012 6

  1. Spaces in code
  2. Don’t swap!
  3. Read the masters
  4. Why you should almost always choose Redis as your database
  5. A web startup is a technological endeavor
  6. Three ideas from Derek Sivers