Antonio Martínez-García

Founder asked: "Can you fix our technical debt?" You have revenue? No? Then you don't have technical debt. You have a product nobody wants. Technical debt is a LUXURY problem. It means: - You have users - You have revenue   - You need to scale If you have 0 users, your problem isn't tech debt. Your problem is: - Wrong market - Wrong problem - Wrong solution - Or all three Stop hiding behind "we need to refactor." Go talk to 10 potential customers instead. Tag a founder who's been "fixing tech debt" for 6 months.

218

24 Comments

Thinking about expanding your team? If Brazil isn’t on your radar yet, it should be. Here’s why so many US and European companies are choosing Brazil as their go-to market for tech talent: → Depth of talent: With more than 630,000 software engineers, the market is mature and highly competitive. → Quality that stands out: Brazilian developers consistently rank among the best in global coding challenges. → Time zone advantage: Work in real time with your US or European teams—no more 3 a.m. meetings. → Retention that lasts: Professionals value international exposure and stick around when they see real growth opportunities. → Cost efficiency without compromise: Senior-level expertise at 30–50% less than in other regions. → Cultural alignment: Strong fit with Western business practices, growing English fluency, and a natural embrace of remote/hybrid work. Hiring in Brazil isn’t just a cost decision. It’s about building loyal, high-performing teams that grow with you. That’s why more and more global companies are doubling down on Brazilian talent. Curious about how this could work for your company? Let’s talk. #Recruitment #Latam #Expansion #GlobalTalent #RemoteWork #FutureOfWork #GlobalTeams #BusinessGrowth

333

12 Comments

Second to bad management, there's one thing that kills engineering productivity and morale more than anything else. Slowness in running and deploying code. This past Friday, someone asked for a non-urgent bug fix at 4:25pm. Got our local environment up and running in seconds, instantly refreshed as I made changes, got immediate code reviews from our team channel, and deployed in minutes. This was the difference between me responding a half hour later that the fix was live in prod vs. asking them to file a JIRA ticket for my team to handle next week. Here's the limits you want to stay under: Time to launch your local env - 30 seconds Time to refresh your local env - A few seconds Time to get a trivial code review - 10 minutes Time to get a beefier code review - A few hours Time to deploy - 15 minutes (pic from the early days of my startup Scoutlit when we were just shipping)

160

182 Comments

Yes, the market is tough for QAs. But our Engenious University students are still getting hired. Last month alone, 5 of our AI & LLM Testing students landed new roles. 👉 One was laid off from a manual QA role 9 months ago 👉 One switched careers from a hostile work environment 👉 One had outdated manual QA experience. So what changed? ✅ They upskilled in testing GenAI apps with tools like Promptfoo ✅ Got mentorship on job search & interview strategy ✅ Worked with a real US-based AI startup through our internship training It’s 2025. Most people are still applying outdated manual skills and strategies from 2017. That doesn’t work anymore. That’s exactly why we built the AI Career Accelerator: to help testers master the #1 in-demand skill for 2025: testing AI Apps and LLMs. 🚀 This is the last cohort of 2025, and we have just 10 seats left. Check out Oct AI Testing Cohort: https://lnkd.in/e5nRzJ5k We kick off next week. Excited to help the next wave of QA professionals become AI QA leaders. #AITesting #Promptfoo #QAjobs #TechCareers #AIQA

38

6 Comments

The shine is starting to wear off vibe coding. I know, because I’ve been there. One moment I’m in Cursor, impressed by what a large language model can produce. The next, I’m staring at the clock, realising I’ve lost hours because it couldn’t navigate the complexity of the codebase I’m working on - and I find myself back in PyCharm, questioning the value of the detour. One answer that’s emerging is "Spec-First Development". You don’t toss vague instructions at an AI and hope for magic. Instead, you craft the clearest, most rigorous specification you can - and let the agent build from that. Better still, treat specifications as code artefacts: versioned, under source control, and continually refined with compacted, curated context. For me, this isn’t a radical shift. I’ve long worked with test-driven development, where the unit test is the specification. And LLMs thrive on this. Unit tests aren’t just notes in prose; they’re executable specifications - formal, computable, and unforgiving in all the right ways. That’s the deeper lesson: when you hand a spec to an LLM, the more formalisation, the better. Natural language is fine, but structure wins. Code loves tests. Maths loves notation. Business, however, has no equivalent - no unit test for strategy documents, compliance rules, or process design. Enter ontologies and knowledge graphs. They give us a way to formalise business semantics, capturing domains in rigorous, computable detail. Paired with an LLM, they don’t just guide the generation - they also validate it. The future of agentic coding - and of LLMs in business more broadly - won’t be built on “vibes.” It will be driven by how well we can formalise intent: transforming ambiguity into something structured, testable, and executable. ⭕ Spec-kit: https://lnkd.in/dPZCgUeq ⭕ What is an Ontology: https://lnkd.in/ePS7ha8z ⭕ What is a Knowledge Graph: https://lnkd.in/e5ed_f8g

394

58 Comments

He Built an Enterprise-Level Software for over a Year. Zero Users. Last week, I sat in a coffee shop with a brilliant friend who showed me something incredible. An enterprise software he'd been building for over a year. Beautifully designed. Thoughtfully architected. Genuinely solves a real problem. I asked him: "How many users do you have?" "None yet. I'm still working on it." "Does anyone know this exists?" "...No." I looked at him and said, "Your first 10 users could've come from your network. But nobody knows your solution exists."? Here's what kills me about this: We resist showing up because we're afraid of crickets. "I don't get engagement." "I don't know what to post." "Nobody cares what I have to say." Meanwhile, someone in your network has the exact problem your solution solves. The numbers don't lie: My second open-source project? The first 5 users came directly from my network. Now it has: • 26 active users • 5 countries • 426 actions taken (times someone actually used a feature) You know I love sharing receipts, but none of that happens if I stay invisible. Let's talk about what 3 likes actually means: In an attention economy where everyone is drowning in content, 3 people stopped scrolling, read your entire post, and chose to acknowledge it. That's not failure. That's three humans who gave you their most precious resource: attention. Leave metrics, focus on connections Don't know what to post? Just be yourself and tell people what you care about. The project you're building. The problem you're solving. etc You don't need profound wisdom. You need an authentic presence. Start small if you need to: → Comment thoughtfully on others' posts → Document what you're building etc Visibility isn't all-or-nothing. It's showing up consistently in whatever way feels natural. What showing up has done for me: • People recognise me from LinkedIn at events and random places • I get DMs with opportunities • The last 3 speaking gigs came from my network • Referrals I've never applied to speak at any event. Visibility did that. The voice in your head: If something inside you is saying, "I should be out there," stop ignoring it. Your ideas, your work, your perspective have value. Quieting that voice doesn't protect you. It just keeps you invisible. The cost of invisibility? Zero impact. "Your silence doesn't serve anyone, including you." Focus on value, not clout The authority comes from consistent value, not chasing viral moments. You don't need permission to be visible: You don't need thousands of followers. You don't need perfect content. You don't need to go viral. You just need to stop being invisible to the people who are already looking for what you offer. It's perfectly fine if you choose not to show up. Not everyone needs to be online, constantly sharing. But if that voice is telling you that you DO need to be out there, then get out there

475

56 Comments

AI is everywhere. But it's not the first wave we've seen. The Evolution We've Witnessed: 1. We started with manual testing, that’s how most of us learned the craft 2. Then automation arrived: Selenium, Cypress, Playwright, CI/CD 3. Now AI dominates every discussion, every team, every meeting Here's what's different this time: Unlike automation, which took years to settle into the industry, AI is already transforming how we work today. But here's the constant truth: Those with strong fundamentals (problem-solving, critical thinking, domain knowledge) always adapt faster.So what do we do? 📌 We keep learning. 📌 We stay curious. 📌 We explore the new. But we also hold on to what really matters. Because the people who grow the fastest and last the longest, are the ones with strong fundamentals. Ready to start your AI journey? If you’re interested in AI but aren’t sure where to begin, I’ve put together a beginner-friendly playlist on YouTube that can help you get started: https://lnkd.in/gtTBT9rr #AI #Testing #Automation #CareerGrowth #QualityEngineering #Learning #ABAutomationHub

52

3 Comments

Pull Requests shouldn’t feel like this. We’ve all opened a large PR review and thought: “Well... this is going to hurt.” Sure, small PRs are great, but sometimes you need the full picture. That’s where stacked PRs help (been using Graphite for that, a tool for managing PRs and code reviews). Stacked PRs treat your feature development as a chain of commits / PRs layered on top of each other. Think of it like a Jenga tower: each block (PR) builds on top of the previous one. pr1 → main pr2 → pr1 pr3 → pr2 Now it’s getting even better. I just got early access to Graphite Chat 👇 - I can literally ask it “what’s going on in this PR?” and it gives me the full story, codebase history, past PRs, even outside context. - I can just highlight it and ask “explain this”, instant breakdown. - Flags risks before reviewers even show up. - When someone leaves feedback, it helps me make sense of it and suggests fixes. - And the best part? When CI blows up, I can just ask “why did this break?” and actually get an answer. I’ll even be able to pop open the Graphite Editor right inside Chat to view and edit the codebase. Reviews feel lighter, more collaborative. Exactly how they should.

1,573

141 Comments

The sequence matters: 1. Build with no-code 2. Find paying customers 3. Hit limitations 4. Then hire engineers Not: 1. Search for CTO 2. Spend 6 months pitching technical co-founders 3. Build something nobody wants 4. Wonder why it failed The market doesn't care about your tech stack. It cares if you solve a problem worth paying for.

41

10 Comments