DEV Community: Michael Machado

"limits of my language are the limits of my world"

Michael Machado — Mon, 13 Jul 2026 10:44:42 +0000

I have read it on Designing Data-Intensive Applications this sentence is impactful. I have learned it in 2024 when a recruiter invited me to join a company in Germany. Yes, I received this opportunity and I didn't know how I could answer the message on LinkedIn, I have used the Google Translate to answer her.

It was really frustrating, but I got this event on my life to change. On following day I subscribed in an English course, I had decided that I wouldn't miss another opportunity because I didn't know English.

I did the recorded classes intensively, I did conversation classes, I have learned a basic vocabulary and some expressions. However conversations classes were not a good experience, we had too much people learning for just one teacher, the time was short for all people inside a classe and on initial levels the classes were not productive.

So, I decided to pay for private classes understanding that I needed full attention to improve faster. It was the best decision, after that I have been one and half hour (twice a week) to improve my speaking and understanding.

The improvement was notorious. Now I'm able to read, write, understand and communicate. It has opened an entire world for me and it matches directly with the title of this article. In other words, if you expand your language, you are expanding your world.

Read as much as you can.

Michael Machado — Sun, 05 Jul 2026 14:28:15 +0000

I have just read The Pragmatic Programmer and I feel as I had learned years of experience in dozens of days. Of course I have to implement the knowledge acquired. However I really like to study the concept of things, I learn easier when I read concept and try to implement by myself. My first experience doing it was when I have done a course about data structures and algorithms. I have implemented binary tree, linked list and more using Go.

About The Pragmatic Programmer I got some skills to implement on my projects. This book was born in 1999 and its concepts still impacting the way to develop, maybe more impactful now than before.

What will I apply on my existing projects ? I'll starting by logs. Recently I had lots of issues on my job and most of them I might solve faster if I had good logs or some times any logs. Last week I had to deploy just logs in a micro-service to understand what was happening, because the application had more than one try without catch or controller returning just BadRequest().

We know that bad codes are written for many reasons: time, pressure, technical debts or anything else. I suggest you to avoid evaluating the developer without appropriate context and sometimes you'll write bad codes. Because of that you should evaluate the product, the code written excluding the person related with.

I'm trying to apply semantic logs. The goal is increase time spent to find root cause and consequently solve it as soon as possible.

Nowadays we have a lot of artificial intelligence resources and it has been very useful. I believe if you mix it with 'programming for interfaces and not for implementations' you might create good apps and save a lot of time. It has been my favorite way to develop using AI providing context, a way to follow and 'boundaries' to respect.

We are in a tight line between improve productivity and delegate too much to Artificial Intelligence. The approach is the same: focus on the "whys" rather than the "hows."

Organize your team, project and life.

Michael Machado — Sat, 27 Jun 2026 20:54:45 +0000

I'm working on my postgraduate of Software Engineering on PUC-RJ and I have noticed that I should be more effective just organizing my company properly.

Devtype is a three people company, as we have a short team, we have tried to avoid overwhelming the workflow. However after some projects we added Jira to manage the project, we created a weekly and now I want to do something kind a lean inception.

Our workflow is I sharing my screen and using the Excalidraw I create some diagrams to represent the system architecture. But I feel that is a mistake. I believe that we should to get the customer requires and chat about it, create a lean inception before starting draw class diagrams or the architecture.

After we have defined tasks, deadlines the things begins to run faster and better. The time spent chatting, defining, drawing is a shortcut to reach the MVP. And believe me, you need to reach the MVP, because before it everything is just an idea or a dream.

Another tip. Create support tools to improve your efficiency. We have toolkit for backend basic requirements like database connection, AWS integration, queue consumer/producer, logs, cryptography and any other thing that you will use in more than one application.

In addition to that I have packages for bank integration, authentication, WhatsApp integration and more. These packages/tools turn the development really easy and you will have a pattern and it increase the maintainability.

The challenge is to create something functional and organized without stiffening the workflow.