https://danielsada.tech/blog/ Recent content in Blogs on Daniel Sada Caraveo | Developer Productivity & Culture Hugo -- gohugo.io en-US Mon, 26 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://danielsada.tech/blog/ai-lazyslop-and-personal-responsibility/ Mon, 26 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://danielsada.tech/blog/ai-lazyslop-and-personal-responsibility/ Once upon a time, I got a PR from a coworker, I’ll call him Mike. Mike sent me a 1600 line pull-request with no tests, entirely written by AI, and expected me to approve it immediately as to not to block him on his deployment schedule. When asking for tests, I’d get pushback on “why do I need tests? It works already”. Then, I’d get a ping from his manager asking on why am I blocking the review. https://danielsada.tech/blog/why-i-have-vinyls-with-no-vinyl-player/ Thu, 08 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://danielsada.tech/blog/why-i-have-vinyls-with-no-vinyl-player/ Recently, a study made the Hacker News’ front page mentioning that 50% of U.S. vinyl buyers don’t own a record player. There was ample discussion on whether it was GenZ collecting aesthetic objects or a fashion statement. They are not wrong, but I wanted to share why I bought a vinyl without a record player. I own four vinyl records. I’ve never played a single one in my house, and I’m not planning to buy a record player. https://danielsada.tech/blog/ai-map-reduce/ Sun, 17 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://danielsada.tech/blog/ai-map-reduce/ Do you remember MapReduce? That distributed computing pattern that powered early Google and Hadoop? “Mapping” a lot of tasks to some compute clusters, then “reducing” the results? Well, I’ve been experimenting with applying the same concept to AI tasks using Claude Code, and the results have been surprisingly powerful. This is already being used to generate RAGs, but it’s a lot more fun to try it locally in your own documents. https://danielsada.tech/blog/experiment-framework/ Mon, 21 Jul 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://danielsada.tech/blog/experiment-framework/ Back in the day, I was on a team that was allergic to change. Every small process improvement or tweak was deeply resented by team members, and it was hard to make progress. Tracking our tasks? Standups? Scrum? Writing status updates asynchronously? Whatever it was, the team was reluctant to try it out. The best manager I’ve ever had, tricked us with the experiment framework. Let’s try standups, but only for a definite period of time, and at the end we can all vote it out. https://danielsada.tech/blog/microsoft-pact/ Sun, 06 Jul 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://danielsada.tech/blog/microsoft-pact/ When you join Microsoft, you hear stories about people who’ve been there for 20 years, who grew up with the company, who never had to worry about sudden changes (maybe except for 2008). The performance management system had its quirks, but there was an understanding that if you did solid work, you’d have a place. But something shifted. Maybe it was the market, maybe it was the pressure to stay competitive with companies that move faster and pay more. https://danielsada.tech/blog/carreer-part-7-how-office-moved-to-git-and-i-loved-devex/ Tue, 10 Jun 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://danielsada.tech/blog/carreer-part-7-how-office-moved-to-git-and-i-loved-devex/ After going in deep in product, I found myself drawn to a different challenge: making other developers more productive. As one of my biggest mentors would always say: “Developer productivity is always ‘Multiplier work’, especially in places where you have a lot of developers. By saving a couple minutes from every developer, every day, you’ve saved years of human life waiting for stuff.” The project that really forged me was the Office migration from Source Depot to Git. https://danielsada.tech/blog/carreer-part-6-the-artisan-phase/ Sun, 20 Apr 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://danielsada.tech/blog/carreer-part-6-the-artisan-phase/ The In-Between: From Founder to Employee After I got my full time offer in Microsoft, I sold my company and moved to work full-time on Microsoft OneNote. I also took time to travel through South America and explore Mexico. Being in those months is like a limbo, expectant of something new coming, yet agressively trying to live in the present. Nevertheless, I started at Microsoft as a Software Engineer. OneNote Services All of the things I’ll list below, can be obtained in full detail in the . https://danielsada.tech/blog/carreer-part-5-many-bosses-own-company/ Sun, 13 Apr 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://danielsada.tech/blog/carreer-part-5-many-bosses-own-company/ “When they say ‘be your own boss’ what they don’t tell you is that you’re trading one boss for dozens. Each client becomes your new manager, and some are far more demanding than any corporate supervisor could ever be.” Opening my company and consulting. While my Microsoft internships provided structure and resources, I was simultaneously running my own company during college. We created apps, web applications, e-commerce solutions, and various digital products for different clients. https://danielsada.tech/blog/carreer-part-4-finding-pride/ Wed, 09 Apr 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://danielsada.tech/blog/carreer-part-4-finding-pride/ “There I was, sitting in a Project Management class, watching my professor demonstrate Microsoft Project; the same software I had just spent my summer adding features to. Some education happens in classrooms; the best happens in the wild.” One of the strange things of college, is that before I started, I already had worked for some time in the field, as well as had some coding for some years before I got in. https://danielsada.tech/blog/carreer-part-3-no-pay-no-work/ Mon, 07 Apr 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://danielsada.tech/blog/carreer-part-3-no-pay-no-work/ Little elephant company — 7 people working out of a random house — 2013 I know we haven’t paid you for 30 days, but would you be willing to float another month? No, sorry, I’m out. Ok, sad to see you are not loyal to the company. No pay, no work It was the end of 2013; I’d gone two paychecks without pay. The client still hadn’t paid, I wasn’t about to start working for free. https://danielsada.tech/blog/carreer-part-2-the-power-of-communication/ Wed, 02 Apr 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://danielsada.tech/blog/carreer-part-2-the-power-of-communication/ There I was, a kid giving the speech for my committee in Berkeley University. Twelve hundred heads looked at me in the auditorium. I felt my cheeks blush. After traveling 3,000 miles from my high school, we were representing Mexico in Berkeley Model UN. I got selected to give a talk to all the attendees. It was a new record in the amount of people I’d talk to at that time. https://danielsada.tech/blog/carreer-part-1-the-foundation-years/ Mon, 31 Mar 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://danielsada.tech/blog/carreer-part-1-the-foundation-years/ You know when you are on a hike, and there is a point where you are exactly midway through it? There is always a reflection moment in there, where some thinking happens. Sometimes you look back and realize: it’s been a long journey so far, hasn’t it? I recently turned 30, which, like all numbers that arbitrarily end with a zero, is a special time for reflection. For funsies and to reflect, I wrote what I’ve been up to the last 12 years and how I got to where I am. https://danielsada.tech/blog/mexico-city-recommendations/ Mon, 30 Sep 2024 00:00:00 +0000 https://danielsada.tech/blog/mexico-city-recommendations/ I was born and raised in Mexico City, and I often get the question of what are my favorite places or plans to visit in Mexico City I enjoy that are compatible with foreigners and shine a light on some of the things Mexico has to offer. Recommended Day 1 - Zocalo and Bellas Artes: Get to Bellas Artes (palace of fine arts). Go in, see the nice paintings, then when you head outside, to the left, you don’t want to miss the “Sanborns de los Azulejos”, it is beautifully decorated, a store and a restaurant. https://danielsada.tech/blog/dev-productivity-is-99-perception/ Wed, 08 May 2024 00:00:00 +0000 https://danielsada.tech/blog/dev-productivity-is-99-perception/ While I was working in OneNote, one of the things the organization wanted to improve was developer productivty. We would conduct a survey called DevSat and get a general developer satisfaction score, measured in Net Satisfaction (NSAT) 1. The EVP would sit every week in this meeting to make sure this developer satisfaction was high across all teams in Microsoft. Microsoft is convinced that there is a correlation between dev satisfaction and productivity. https://danielsada.tech/blog/programs-that-have-saved-hn-100hours/ Fri, 11 Feb 2022 00:00:00 +0000 https://danielsada.tech/blog/programs-that-have-saved-hn-100hours/ Five years ago (how time flies) I made a blog post about programs that have saved me 100+ hours, after uploading my article to HackerNews Thread 1 Thread 2 a lot of people responded with their favorite programs that have saved them 100+ hours. I went out and took the best ones and compiled them into this list. AutoHotKey AutoHotKey is a free, open-source scripting language for Windows that allows users to easily create small to complex scripts for all kinds of tasks such as: form fillers, auto-clicking, macros, etc. https://danielsada.tech/blog/mexico-technology/ Wed, 25 Nov 2020 00:00:00 +0000 https://danielsada.tech/blog/mexico-technology/ I recently graduated, and in order to get my official graduation title I needed to get my private and public key from the government. That’s right, you go to the government’s office, certify that you are who you are, and you’ll get a private and public key in an USB key from the government which you can use to do all your bureaucracy. You also get a TaxID which is comprised of https://danielsada.tech/blog/affinity-google/ Mon, 31 Aug 2020 00:00:00 +0000 https://danielsada.tech/blog/affinity-google/ Hey everyone, here’s a .aftemplate file for you to download that includes all of the Display Google Ads templates. Edit November 25 2020: It seems there is a bug which generates an extra pixel when exporting, you need to put it in a integer (not decimal) X and Y position for it to export to the right size. I’ve updated the file with correct X and Y positions. https://danielsada.tech/blog/cloud-services-dos/ Tue, 12 Nov 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://danielsada.tech/blog/cloud-services-dos/ Over my work in different scales of services, I’ve noticed that there is a common pattern in some of these services that makes them easier to approach and cause less headaches to the engineers that handle them. When we deal with millions of users making requests all the time across the world, I’ve noted that there are a few things that help a lot of people to sleep at night comfortably. https://danielsada.tech/blog/on-cynisism/ Mon, 10 Jun 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://danielsada.tech/blog/on-cynisism/ Cynicism, distrust, skepticism, doubt, disbelief; an inclination to question whether something will happen or whether it is worthwhile; pessimism. At some point in our lives, we find cynics on our environment: “I don’t believe we can do this thing” or “I really think we shouldn’t do that”, “Why bother going and doing it, we are not going to succeed anyway”. If you think about it, there are two voices behind a cynic: the voice of experience, and the voice of emotion. https://danielsada.tech/blog/three-times-microsoft-intern/ Sat, 23 Jun 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://danielsada.tech/blog/three-times-microsoft-intern/ After 3 internships In Microsoft, (and becoming a senior intern in the process) I’ve decided to write a blog post about what I’ve learned in three summers here. First: What did I do in three internships? For my first internship, I worked in the Microsoft Project Server, using SQL clustered indexes and optimizing our endpoint for consuming project tasks. For my second internship, I worked on the Microsoft Project Client, helping create the all new agile view. https://danielsada.tech/blog/ads-the-obscure-side-of-ntfs/ Tue, 12 Jun 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://danielsada.tech/blog/ads-the-obscure-side-of-ntfs/ Have you ever had a hard drive which runs out of space while there is still space remaining? Have you ever wondered where that space goes? Let me show you a magic trick First I’ll save a message in message.txt Nothing here nothing there, I’ll save two secret messages the first one is a secret, the second one a big file of text. (but I could save a jpg or an exe). https://danielsada.tech/blog/copy-node-modules/ Tue, 23 Jan 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://danielsada.tech/blog/copy-node-modules/ Sometimes when we are making backups on our files, and specially if you are a Node.js developer, you’ll suffer whilst copying your repositories to another place for making a backup. (Provided you don’t have git for all your repositories) Just do: rsync -av --exclude 'node_modules' source destination And you are set. You could also exclude some other things like adding adding gitignore rules rsync -av --filter=":- .gitignore" source destination https://danielsada.tech/blog/apollo-software-history/ Mon, 15 Jan 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://danielsada.tech/blog/apollo-software-history/ As tradition follows, we usually get screenings of interesting movies in class, today we got a screening of Moon Machines [1] a documentary by the science channel about the Apollo Guidance system and their corresponding code.This documentary was about the testimonies of people in MIT and the general creation of the whole Apollo mission. What is interesting is that some years ago, I saw a GitHub repository of the commentated Apollo code, It is wonderful to see such a marvelous display of engineering be on a repository in the internet. https://danielsada.tech/blog/remove-wp-config/ Mon, 15 Jan 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://danielsada.tech/blog/remove-wp-config/ In my InfoSec class, we were asked to show a preliminary attempt at google hacking. We were tasked to try to get some indices of google hacking performed, to show us the importance of monitoring our site’s search engine exposure and possible file requests permissions. Examples included: site:something filename:admin.php While it certainly is something that sounds fun, for me this is more of a gimmick, nevertheless it made me think for a second. https://danielsada.tech/blog/programs-saved-me-100-hours/ Wed, 15 Mar 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://danielsada.tech/blog/programs-saved-me-100-hours/ Since I wrote this, there has been two HN threads on this blog, they contain super useful links and programs, go see them! Thank you for reading! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13887237 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22849208 Along the year I’ve been working on several web platforms where repetitive tasks are usually the norm. From batch optimizing a thousand images, to changing from this obscure format to csv or json. What if you need to critically update a file in your client’s and you aren’t fancy enough to use some kind of continuous integration tool I’ll give you some tips and tricks to be productive. https://danielsada.tech/blog/passive-agressive-cc/ Sat, 16 Apr 2016 00:00:00 +0000 https://danielsada.tech/blog/passive-agressive-cc/ I found this quote interesting, it was made by reddit user /u/Bytewave, he is a Senior Engineer in a well positioned Telco in Canada. He posts his stories and experiences to reddit. I often found a hell of a lot of Passive-Agressive CCing and I find that his opinion is relevant. “Passive-aggressive CCing (where you copy ‘important people’ who do not need to be involved in an issue to throw weight around) is one of the surest giveaways that someone is not a reliable professional and should not be trusted with anything critical. https://danielsada.tech/blog/microsoft-internship/ Sat, 02 Apr 2016 00:00:00 +0000 https://danielsada.tech/blog/microsoft-internship/ Being my dream to work for one of the Big 4, since an early age I stated to learn the skill-set I’d need in order to be interviewed in Microsoft. This blog intends to be a little recap of the things you can do to make your possibility of entering a Big 4, far greater. Early in October, Microsoft came to my campus for recruiting. We had a very cool coding contest, and did good enough to get another interview. https://danielsada.tech/blog/client-shaming/ Tue, 05 Jan 2016 00:00:00 +0000 https://danielsada.tech/blog/client-shaming/ When you work in the software industry, indubitably you will find the (now very famous)BOFH, and Clients from Hell material, where a technical person complains about a client. Whether they asked for an impossible thing or software that doesn’t even make sense, the common mood (or at least what I get from them) is that the client is somewhat stupid, or short sighted. I don’t want to discuss whether the clients are on the right or not, but I want to talk about the way technical people address non technical people. https://danielsada.tech/blog/milk-as-a-service/ Thu, 04 Jun 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://danielsada.tech/blog/milk-as-a-service/ With all the new technologies emerging for cloud migration, there is a wide acceptance that cloud services are the cheapest, and best way to manage some kinds of infrastructures. Nevertheless, on the decision on wether we should migrate into cloud must still be analysed in other ways. That’s why the current Milk-as-a-Service analogy is great, as it illustrates the downfalls of moving to cloud, and the exact situation on wether you need a migration or not.