Author: Edvaldo Freitas
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KPIs in Software Development: What to Track in 2026
Most engineering teams have some dashboard lying around. Usually it’s full of charts tracking everything from Jira ticket velocity to CI build time. The problem shows up when you ask how those numbers help anyone make a better decision. Most of the time, nobody knows how to answer. This is the common state of KPIs…
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Code Standards and Best Practices for Growing Teams
When an engineering team is small, informal agreements tend to work just fine. There’s a shared understanding of how things should be built, because any disagreement can be quickly resolved in a Slack thread or a conversation. But as the team grows from five to fifty developers, these unwritten rules start to cause problems. Suddenly,…
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The challenge of managing multiple projects as a Tech Lead
Your scope as a Tech Lead almost never stays confined to a single, clean workstream. As a product grows, you end up responsible for a new feature initiative, a critical infrastructure migration, and a lingering performance issue, all at the same time. This isn’t a promotion; it’s an expansion of responsibility that quietly creeps in…
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Refactor or Rewrite? Dealing With Code That’s Grown Too Large
The decision to refactor or rewrite a large codebase usually starts with a feeling of friction. Small changes that should take a day suddenly take a week. Every new feature seems to break an old one, and the team’s bug backlog grows faster than it shrinks. This happens because systems don’t just age, they accumulate…
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Engineering metrics: using data (DORA and others) to improve the team
The conversation around engineering metrics often gets stuck on the wrong things. We end up tracking activities like lines of code or number of commits per week, which say almost nothing about the health of our system or the effectiveness of the team. In practice, these metrics are easy to game and create incentives for…
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How to Improve Software Delivery Speed
A lot of engineering teams seem to be doing everything “right”: they run sprints, have a CI/CD pipeline, sometimes even a well-defined microservices architecture. And yet, getting code to production is still slow and painful. Releases slip, large pull requests turn into chaos to review and integrate, and almost every other deployment ends up causing…
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Tech Lead vs. Engineering Manager: understanding the differences in team roles
What happens in many engineering teams, especially as they grow, is that the line between technical leadership and people management becomes incredibly blurry. The most senior engineer often ends up taking on both roles: being the final word on system architecture while also trying to handle performance reviews and career conversations. This creates a confusing…
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Why you should use an AI Code Review Tool
If you’re on Earth, you know code generation tools are now a standard part of the developer workflow. We’re producing code faster than ever, but this speed is creating a new, obvious bottleneck: the pull request. Reviewing a 500-line PR that was written in an hour by an AI assistant is a fundamentally different task…
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How to plan your engineering team’s capacity
Every team goes through a planning session that ends with a roadmap everyone feels good about, only to reach the end of the quarter having delivered about half of what was promised. Everyone was busy, pull requests were merged, and fires were put out, but the outcome doesn’t match the effort. This gap isn’t about…