My name is Lorenzo Pasqualis. I started writing software in 1984. Over the years I used many languages, technologies, and tools. I have been in technical leadership positions since the early 2000s, and in full-time executive roles since the beginning of 2014.
Today I spend most of my time focused on the art of architecting scalable systems, organizing engineering efforts, hiring and training talent, managing people, leading engineering teams, and helping designing solutions in the EdTech industry. I am very close to the technology as an architect, but my principal concern is people. I am an active advocate for Women in Tech, a believer in servant leadership, and a lifetime learner.
I still code; mostly personal projects or to help my teams. Coding is a passion that will never die, and staying close to the technology makes me a better leader of technologists.
I am the author of a blog, CoderHood, dedicated to the human dimension of software engineering. In other words, it's about people and their life in the software industry.
I have been x-posting some of my articles here on dev.to. Dev.to is an amazing community that I like to support in whatever way I can ( Ben and Jess, you rock! Well done! ). If you have any questions that you think I can answer, ask away. I will respond as best as I can, and I might write a blog post to expand on the topic.
Ask me anything!
Top comments (74)
Hi Lorenzo thank you for sharing. I have little to no background in software. I work in a small firm as their marketing graduate and constantly find myself frustrated as I don't have the skill set to implement my ideas or communicate it with a third party developer (no in-house developer). I want to learn how to communicate with software developers and I am interested in software architecture and scalable systems, considering restudying. Do you have any tips on ways to learn how to communicate with developers to lead projects and build towards becoming a project manager?
What has changed most in the industry since you started?
What has stayed the same?
What are some areas in leadership that you think engineering didn't adequately prepare you for? For me, I'm spending more time in product now and I've started getting better at understanding or formulating the "why" behind what we choose to engineer but still having a hard time with the articulation and organization of strategy for others to see and understand.
Hi Lorenzo, I am quite new to the professional career, I've been working on Enterprise software just for 4 years, before I was just doing small website as a freelancer to pay my university studies.
Something that really scares me is getting old in this job, I can already tell that I am slower to pick up new tech and more attached to what I know in comparison of what I used to be when I was 18-19... and I think this will get worse aging.
I am really scared that at some point I will lose my ability to adapt to changes completly and get useless.
Ho do you keep yourself always updated on cutting-edge tech stack when your learning pace slows down due to the age?
(I am not calling you old, lol, I think is scientifically proven that learning pace decrease with age)
What were your thoughts of going from coding full time to switching to leadership positions? Any reflections on the transition that you'd like to share?
Also, did you ever juggle with doing both at the same time?
I've gone through the same transition: How have you managed to balance "management" with keeping up with the technical details and implementations that impact your team? It's hard to find time to actually write code these days!
I'm trying to make it brief, forgive the rudeness :)
Definitely this. I'm currently making the switch to management and this is one of the primary factors that drove my decision. I feel like I have a lot to offer at the team level (I'm currently a technical lead) but that I'll be able to help even more people in a full-time management role.
Lorenzo, thank you for writing back. It's really encouraging to receive such a thoughtful response. I appreciate how you provide useful resources and direction. I've heard good things about SCRUM, I'll look into it. I agree that getting a mentor and tech lead would be helpful. Would love to read your blog haha.
I make money specifically from knowing how to talk out ideas and implementation with marketing folks these days. It has turned into a specialization of mine by the looks of it, actually. I started doing graphics in marketing as a print designer (might be from that?)
I'm not a technical lead, I'm just a talkative developer/designer and consultant mostly at times. I like to joke and have fun, so that always helps on the getting-to-know on the clients and then understanding their needs.
Lorenzo is correct in terms of us speaking to non techs. Although, I prefer my project managers to be past devs as they understand our pain points more readily on shipping/maintenance/politics, etc.
I still very much need a project manager to check in on me from time and a good manager for guidance on various matters that may crop up. I suppose that would be a form of mentorship in some ways. I have learned a lot from some managers I've had. :)
Thanks for sharing that's really good insight!
I was only 10 years old in 84 but I started coding machine code when I was 13. Today I work 2 cleaning jobs that add up to 39 to 66 hours per week that are at night or in the early morning. In theory there should be some part time coding job that pays a lot more but like this my mind is available for personal use.
I'm actually looking to start an internet revolution for the betterment of mankind. (I can dream right?) Over the years I've envisioned some wildly complex ideas that for the most part are well beyond anyones attention span and skill set. (duds) In doing so I started to see that the best ideas are those where a basic understanding can be had in seconds with infinite steps into further complexity.
I've managed to simplify something like a hundred ideas to the point where I should really start working on their implementation. I've picked one for you based on your love for scalability.
The goal is to create a organic new-news aggregation network and to dramatically speed up news aggregation.
It involves 2 file types I called: Even Simpler Syndication [ESS] and No Nonsense Outline [NNO]
I wrote a spec here go-here.nl/ess-and-nno but I think I can give a better description tailored for you.
An ESS is a tiny comma separated text document with a unxi build date, an url for an rss feed then, for each news item, 1) a publication date that is an offset in minutes from the build date and 2) a tiny check sum.
Aggregators should limit their results by age and discard an ESS if its build time or top article indicates it being to old.
An NNO file is the end result of aggregation that can be used for the next session but is primal intend is publication/sharing.
It it s a comma separated text document that starts with a unix build time followed by a sorted list of items 1) feed url, 2) minutes before build, 3) title checksum
The file is build after the aggregator aggregates the users hundreds, thousands or millions of ESS, RSS and/or Atom subscriptions while reducing the result list by a configured amount. (say 3000)
When published a 2nd user can load the NNO into their aggregator which should fetch the top feed items listed in the NNO until they have a screen full of results. (scrolling loads more)
The 2nd aggregator can then proceed to fetch that users own subscriptions and/or parse additional NNO files into the result set.
When done they can publish their own NNO file.
Ideally the aggregators maintain their own manually unsubscribed feed list and implement a configurable filter like a word and a word combination filter, a Bayes filter, a machine learning implementation or some other filters. The news items displayed should have an indication about their origin (which NNO file) and they could provide an auto translate link or do inline-translation of headlines/articles.
The point of the entire exercise is to have people access the internet without a multinational man in the middle.
In my experience a few thousand RSS and Atom feeds will produce at least one truly fascinating thing to read per day while larger amounts allow for more aggressive filtering.
Sadly, RSS and Atom files can be so large and are so hard to parse that a home connection can do only a very limited number of them. If there are a billion websites ten thousand is only 0.001% if each request would take a second to resolve ten thousand would be 166 minutes. If your home pc can do 10 per second you still have to wait for 16 minutes while loading the top 40 results of an NNO file would take only 4 seconds.
I think in those 16 minutes combined with a decade of finding and filtering feeds real value is produced. If the result set can be enriched several times per day with input from other users (thereby allowing for more elaborate contextual filtering) the end result accumulates value faster than it expires.
The big question is: Where do I go from here?
I wrote an (untested) Node.js module for ESS, I will make a PHP version as well. I will attempt to make my powerful but userless aggregator more user friendly but mass adoption is the ultimate pipe dream.
What ideas/suggestions do you have for this project?
Ill add a news result just for fun:
news.go-here.nl
I'm sorry for the lack of tech websites ;)