Vitor Paladini

These are some of the principles and beliefs that guide my work:

- Humility, respect, and truth[1] are fundamental to any collective project.

- Strive for pragmatism, clarity, and objectiveness.

- Provide people with means to do their best work, align expectations clearly, get out of the way.

- Be wary of small expectation conflicts that morph into big engineering problems.

- Over-communication is insurance against under-communication disasters.

- Technical debt is a tool—understanding its impact allows you to wield it efficiently.

- Cognitive load awareness is the best coding standard.

- Accept that people, and the systems we build, are inherently fallible—plan around it.

- Some psychology, neuroscience[2], anthropology, and game theory basics go a long way.

- Engineering managers should never stop coding.

And here’s a quick summary of my career:

- Started working with the web in 2009 as the industry was moving from table layouts to CSS.

- Built far too many websites during that era when selling “digital presence” to SMBs was the norm.

- Fell in love with freelancing and the whole concept of making money with computers—ended up dropping out of my visual arts undergraduate program (still a big part of me, though).

- Leaned into project management and, quite inevitably, team management as things started to scale.

- Worked at a large, Nasdaq listed company, then at an ambitious startup where the entire team could fit inside a small car—learned a ton along the way.

- Joined Circuit, spent a couple of years deep in web engineering, then transitioned into a healthy mix of engineering and management—helped build a successful React product[3] and its engineering team[4] from the ground up.

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[1] - https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/debugging-teams/9781491932049/

[2] - https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/the-programmers-brain/9781617298677/

[3] - https://getcircuit.com/teams

[4] - https://theorg.com/org/getcircuit