Pablo Fernandez

Author: Pablo Fernandez

  • Building my green French cleat wall

    Building my green French cleat wall

    Watch video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y_5m6fLS3lI

  • Creating blog posts in WordPress.com programatically

    Creating blog posts in WordPress.com programatically

    One of my projects, Unbreach, has a database of more than 600 breaches. These come from haveibeenpwned and they are composed of some metadata, a one-paragraph description, and an image. I wanted to improve these with more content, links to articles, tweets, videos, and some content of my own. I decided that a good way […]

  • Is the CTO title tainted? I think so

    Is the CTO title tainted? I think so

    What a CTO does varies from company to company. One way in which the role changes dramatically is with the size of the department. When the tech department is: 1 person, the CTO is mostly a developer. 2 to 10 people, the CTO becomes a manager. They stablish what developers do and executes it. 10 […]

  • I renamed my book on hiring and managing remote teams, it was painful

    I renamed my book on hiring and managing remote teams, it was painful

    Originally my book was called “Building and Managing Distributed Teams“. I loved that title and people in my social circle loved it too. A friend of mine even told me something along the lines of “I’m so envious I wish I had that title”. And for the two years or so that it took me […]

  • This simple GitHub config change puts can put you at the top of my hiring list

    This simple GitHub config change puts can put you at the top of my hiring list

    I’ve hired about 20 developers in my career so far (and I’m looking forward to hire more). When job applications arrive I separate them in three piles: Yes, No, and Maybe. It’s better to do Yes and No piles, but it’s a luxury that I haven’t had (if curious, drop a comment and I’ll write […]

  • How to feel more productive after moving from coder to manager

    How to feel more productive after moving from coder to manager

    I started coding when I was 7 years old and until I was 29 or so, my whole professional life was coding. Then, the startup I co-founded had to hire some people because it was doing well and I became a manager. I discovered I love managing as much as coding, but there was an […]

  • Paper, Kindle, Audible, which one should I chose?

    Paper, Kindle, Audible, which one should I chose?

    All of them, of course, depending on what you are reading. Here’s a short overview of when to use each of them inspired by a Twitter conversation with Tania Dsouza. If the book is amazing and you need to highlight stuff, buy the Kindle version. If it’s a book that you lend or give away, […]

  • One on One Meetings (a free chapter from How to Hire and Manage Remote Teams)

    One on One Meetings (a free chapter from How to Hire and Manage Remote Teams)

    The term one-on-one evolved to refer to a specific type of meeting and does not mean any general meeting that has two people on it. One-on-ones are the regular meetings between a manager and each of their reportees. One-on-ones are always important but in a distributed team they become critical – mainly because you are […]

  • Hybrid work isn’t the solution (mostly)

    Hybrid work isn’t the solution (mostly)

    Now that a lot of the world is trying to go back to normal post-pandemic I see hybrid work being proposed as the solution and I strongly disagree that it is the future. The problem with hybrid work is one of real estate. To understand that, let’s go back in time to 2019, before we […]

  • Using Font Awesome 6 in a Rails 7 project that uses importmaps

    Using Font Awesome 6 in a Rails 7 project that uses importmaps

    I just figured out how to use Font Awesome 6 in a Rails 7 project that uses importmaps. I’m not entirely sure why this works and why some of the workarounds are needed, but my googling yielded no results when I was searching so hopefully here I’ll be saving the next person some time. If […]