Refactoring Podcast Luca Rossi

Today's guest is Daniel Vassallo, the creator of the Small Bets community, which counts more than 5 ,000 members and includes engineers, entrepreneurs, and creators of all kinds.

Daniel is also a former software engineer at AWS, the author of The Good Parts of AWS and created a successful Twitter course.

With Daniel, we will talk about his unconventional journey in tech, the Small Bets philosophy, and advice for engineers about careers, site projects, technology and skills.

Here is what we talked about:

(01:11) Introduction & background
(05:21) Small Bets' genesis & philosophy
(14:36) Understanding the market
(19:36) Taking care of the downsides
(24:43) Improving your lifestyle first
(29:05) The dangers of labelling yourself
(32:10) Allocating your time
(37:13) Self-managing your own work
(45:34) Transitioning to a self-employed lifestyle
(52:21) The selection criteria for your ideas

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Today's guest is Thiago Ghisi, Director of Engineering at Nubank.

Thiago has had an incredible tech career. Before Nubank, he worked at Apple, Amex and ThoughtWorks. He is also a deep thinker, hosts a podcast and constantly shares great advice on X and LinkedIn.

During our chat with Thiago, we talked about what makes managers successful, career expectations and frameworks and how to build a great tech career in 2024.

Here is what we talked about:

(01:13) Introduction
(03:11) What makes people in tech productive
(07:57) Beyond the feedback loop
(11:24) Becoming a technical manager
(18:45) How to be successful as Staff+ Engineer
(26:47) From expert to achiever to strategist
(34:46) Know your context but don't attach to it
(46:00) The Four Ps
(56:43) Q&A

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Andrew Weaver is co-founder and CEO of CTO Academy, an educational product that works with thousands of CTO today. Andrew has over 25+ years of executive-level experience with companies of various size, including enterprises, SME and early-stage companies across multiple sectors.

With Andrew, we discussed gaining the proper skillset to be a good CTO, the imbalances in the tech space, and how to keep up with the current technologies.

Here is what we talked about:

(00:00) Introduction

(03:02) What is CTO Academy and how it works

(07:53) What makes a good CTO

(14:01) The CTO mindset

(20:06) Being a CTO in a remote environment

(23:20) Unleashing the "quiet genius"

(28:11) How AI is changing tech

(36:58) Education & micro-learning

(45:11) Q&A

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Wes Kao is a marketing executive, entrepreneur, and advisor who writes an amazing newsletter for high-performers in tech.

She is co-founder of Maven, an edtech company that raised $25M from First Round and Andreessen Horowitz. Previously, she co-founded the altMBA with bestselling author Seth Godin.



Here is what we talked about:

(00:00) Introduction

(03:08) Managing up

(10:13) Bridging the gap between managers and reports

(13:33) The “Bad Things / Good Things” framework

(19:14) Good communication in the remote era

(24:17) The transition to remote work at Maven

(29:28) Sync vs async communication

(33:41) Asynchronous videos

(38:39) Transitioning to a Manager

(46:57) Psychological safety

(53:03) Over-communicating is communicating

(58:59) Wes’ approach to reading


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Maria Gutierrez is the VP of Engineering at Personio, and ex VP of Engineering and Operations at Twitter.

With Maria we talked about how to build healthy and impactful engineering orgs as they scale. We touched on everything from processes to remote work, development cycle, hiring, structuring teams and more.

(00:00) Introduction
(02:12) Maria's career journey
(05:18) How hyper-growth breaks engineering teams, and how to prevent it
(09:32) How to balance speed and quality
(13:40) What a high performing team looks like
(15:46) How to scale without adding friction
(19:22) Personio's engineering team and growth
(21:02) Remote work: impact, relationships, and challenges
(32:54) How remote work impacts different roles
(38:09) Transition from engineer to manager
(45:08) How to use engineering productivity metrics
(51:05) The use of AI in Maria's teams
(54:50) The evolution of engineering managers
(58:11) Career advice for engineers

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Kathryn Koehler is the Director of Productivity Engineering at Netflix.

Her teams focus on the development environment and associated experiences, which enable and empower developers at Netflix to bootstrap, code, build, test, debug, and maintain software more effectively and efficiently.

Productivity is an ever-controversial topic in engineering, and with Kathryn we dived right into it! Here is what we talked about:

(00:00) Introduction

(03:54) Netflix Culture

(10:37) Developer Productivity

(22:54) Platform Teams

(28:57) Meetings, Processes & Planning

(41:26) Productivity Metrics

(52:44) Q&A: AI, metrics, remote

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You can also find this at:


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