/posts/Recent content in Blog on Paolo G.Hugoen-usFri, 01 May 2026 00:01:31 +0200/posts/now-and-always/Thu, 23 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000/posts/now-and-always/Six words went out from Milan on the evening of April 24, 1945, and the war ended. Eighty-one years later, my grandmother is gone and I still go have lunch with the same friends every April 25. There&rsquo;s a reason the lunch is short and the work behind it is long./posts/slip-sliding-away/Mon, 20 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000/posts/slip-sliding-away/I skipped a couple of weeks of writing, again. I used to read that as laziness. But sometimes it&rsquo;s a signal that a hobby has quietly turned into a hustle, and the thing you loved has stopped being itself. Notes on Paul Simon, Four Thousand Weeks, and doing things for their own sake./posts/dead-reckoning-agile/Thu, 02 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000/posts/dead-reckoning-agile/Before GPS, pilots estimated position from a known start, a heading, and elapsed time. No certainty. Just disciplined inference and constant correction. It&rsquo;s also what Agile software development actually is, under all the ceremony./posts/leaving-a-fingerprint-on-the-day/Thu, 12 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000/posts/leaving-a-fingerprint-on-the-day/Why childhood summers felt longer than they were, why adult months disappear without a trace, and what I built to do something about it./posts/littlewoods-law/Sat, 07 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000/posts/littlewoods-law/A Cambridge mathematician proved that a &lsquo;one in a million&rsquo; event happens to each of us about once a month. Your impossible outage, your freak personnel situation: not freaks. Scheduled./posts/quiet-competence/Sat, 21 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000/posts/quiet-competence/Alice didn&rsquo;t fall down the rabbit hole because she had a plan. She fell because she was curious. I think there&rsquo;s a lesson in that./posts/how-i-use-my-calendar/Sat, 14 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000/posts/how-i-use-my-calendar/I went from two blocks and a lunch break to a Mondrian painting. Here&rsquo;s how I structure my week — colours, shock absorbers, and all — so that when things go sideways, I can still breathe./posts/five-types-technical-debt/Fri, 23 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000/posts/five-types-technical-debt/Technical debt isn&rsquo;t just &ldquo;bad code&rdquo;. Learn five concrete types of technical debt (mortgage, student loan, depreciation, credit card, environmental debit) and a simple decision matrix to know what to fix and what to ignore./posts/pid-compass/Thu, 22 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000/posts/pid-compass/How does feedback control applies to teams and work? I came up with the PID Compass as a way to tune how you respond, stabilize, and anticipate./posts/cap-theorem-teams/Tue, 20 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000/posts/cap-theorem-teams/In distributed systems, you pick two of three: consistency, availability, partition tolerance. Teams work the same way. Here&rsquo;s why you can&rsquo;t have alignment, speed, and distribution all at once./posts/imposter-syndrome-feeling-like-fraud-useful/Fri, 16 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000/posts/imposter-syndrome-feeling-like-fraud-useful/I spent my first months at AWS convinced I&rsquo;d been hired by mistake. Imposter syndrome felt like a bug, but it turned out to give me useful perspective about the gaps I could see, and about everyone else in the room pretending they weren&rsquo;t confused too./posts/inbox-five-for-emails/Thu, 08 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000/posts/inbox-five-for-emails/Inbox Zero is exhausting. Ignoring everything is reckless. Inbox Five is a pragmatic email management system using email folders to separate Action, Waiting, and Reference. Here&rsquo;s a system I use, that actually works for real people with real inboxes./posts/speed-of-loneliness/Thu, 11 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000/posts/speed-of-loneliness/You will never meet an alien. Not because they don&rsquo;t exist, but because the universe is structured, at a fundamental level, to keep you apart. And humans sometimes drift apart even when they&rsquo;re physically close. Yet, we still reach out./posts/paradox-of-the-present/Wed, 03 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000/posts/paradox-of-the-present/The world upgraded but our mental models didn&rsquo;t. We&rsquo;re trying to live 2025 lives with 1825 expectations—and wondering why everything feels off./posts/on-the-meaning-of-life/Fri, 14 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000/posts/on-the-meaning-of-life/Life has no meaning. Your consciousness does. Here&rsquo;s what that actually means./posts/how-to-handle-performance-conversations/Wed, 05 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000/posts/how-to-handle-performance-conversations/Performance conversations go wrong when you prepare for the feedback but not for what comes after: the defensiveness, the ownership problem, and the follow-through gap./posts/the-slowness-advantage/Wed, 15 Oct 2025 08:00:04 +0200/posts/the-slowness-advantage/<p>I&rsquo;ve been hiking lately, walking a lot, mostly on mountains.</p> <p>I live not too far from the Alps, and there is a never ending choice of trails, peaks, and alpine refuges with great food and views.</p>/posts/what-actually-motivates-people/Wed, 08 Oct 2025 00:00:00 +0000/posts/what-actually-motivates-people/Beyond money and titles, what really drives people to do their best work? Understanding intrinsic motivation changes how you lead, manage, and collaborate./posts/it-s-always-day-1/Fri, 14 Jul 2023 00:00:00 +0000/posts/it-s-always-day-1/This is a slightly edited version of the message I shared with my organization on my last day at Amazon. I hope you find something useful in it./posts/to-stavros-my-friend/Fri, 07 Apr 2023 00:00:00 +0000/posts/to-stavros-my-friend/I&rsquo;ve been thinking about whether to write this or not for a day or two. I don&rsquo;t think it&rsquo;s relevant to this blog, and it&rsquo;s kind of personal. But here goes. When I was 21, I moved back from Berlin to my hometown. Let&rsquo;s just say it was a complicated time./posts/on-good-on-done-and-on-how-easy-it-is-to-get-lost/Thu, 30 Mar 2023 00:00:00 +0000/posts/on-good-on-done-and-on-how-easy-it-is-to-get-lost/Why perfectionism kills progress, and why shipping imperfect work beats waiting for perfect conditions./posts/star-interviewing-for-wile-e-coyote/Wed, 08 Mar 2023 00:00:00 +0000/posts/star-interviewing-for-wile-e-coyote/I&rsquo;ve done over 200 job interviews in just less than a decade, just as an interviewer. I&rsquo;ve used for all of them the STAR technique. Here&rsquo;s how that works, so you can ace your next interview. An job interview typically includes two parts: a skill assessment, and a person assessment./posts/why-math-is-awesome-and-a-proof/Mon, 06 Mar 2023 00:00:00 +0000/posts/why-math-is-awesome-and-a-proof/I find math really interesting. Not just because of the real world implications, but because the mindset it gives you is empowering. You follow the trail of logical breadcrumbs following rules that are so intuitive they are clearly true, and see where that leads you./posts/6-good-reasons-to-use-simple-text-files-for-your-notes/Tue, 28 Feb 2023 00:00:00 +0000/posts/6-good-reasons-to-use-simple-text-files-for-your-notes/You might have noticed at this point that I have two main note storage formats: an analogic one based on a good notebook and a fountain pen, and &rsquo;note files&rsquo;. Here&rsquo;s the secret: note files, for me, are just text files./posts/how-to-take-notes-on-paper/Thu, 23 Feb 2023 00:00:00 +0000/posts/how-to-take-notes-on-paper/When I was in school, I was basically just told at some point to take notes. At some point someone probably clarified that it meant &ldquo;write things down&rdquo;. That, I think, is pretty useless advice./posts/how-to-quickly-profile-people/Wed, 15 Feb 2023 00:00:00 +0000/posts/how-to-quickly-profile-people/Criminal Minds is enthralling: a bunch of gun bearing nerds with a private airplane fly to places to find serial killers by profiling their behaviour and personality. So cool. Maybe you want to be a profiler too./posts/mission-vision-and-other-weird-words/Mon, 13 Feb 2023 00:00:00 +0000/posts/mission-vision-and-other-weird-words/I hear a lot of confusion around a bunch of words. These words are &lsquo;mission&rsquo;, &lsquo;vision&rsquo;, &lsquo;strategy&rsquo;, &lsquo;roadmap&rsquo;, &lsquo;backlog&rsquo;. I get it: it&rsquo;s all a bit vague, and they all connect together somehow, but let&rsquo;s put some clarity in, so that you can stop hearing them used interchangeably as much./posts/happy-projects-are-smart-projects/Fri, 10 Feb 2023 00:00:00 +0000/posts/happy-projects-are-smart-projects/You might have heard of SMART goals. You might even have heard of smart working. Today, I bring you SMART projects: a five points mnemonic to ensure your next software project goes amazing! Ok, maybe I&rsquo;m exaggerating. But it&rsquo;s still solid advice, in my opinion./posts/what-i-understood-about-mindfulness/Wed, 08 Feb 2023 00:00:00 +0000/posts/what-i-understood-about-mindfulness/Almost everything, in life, is some sort of game or choreography. Any activity you do every day has a purpose. It has rules, it has winning and losing to some degree. It is basically a game. Mindfulness is about exiting the games, standing on the sidelines for a bit./posts/a-few-random-thoughts/Tue, 07 Feb 2023 00:00:00 +0000/posts/a-few-random-thoughts/Three counterintuitive ideas: why being first locally beats global competition, how regret minimization drives better decisions, and the power of small consistent actions./posts/remember-to-live/Fri, 27 Jan 2023 00:00:00 +0000/posts/remember-to-live/Life happens. And it happened to me yesterday. I had to drive around all day for some urgent errand, got home late, had to deal with kids who didn&rsquo;t want to sleep. This morning, I was tired and slept a little longer./posts/industrial-strength-todo-lists/Tue, 24 Jan 2023 00:00:00 +0000/posts/industrial-strength-todo-lists/Let&rsquo;s talk about todo lists. You know, those messy notes that live on some paper, your email inbox, a couple of note files, and mostly your brain. Basic lists are cool, but often don&rsquo;t make the cut. Here&rsquo;s how to build a system that actually works./posts/email-unwritten-best-practices/Mon, 23 Jan 2023 00:00:00 +0000/posts/email-unwritten-best-practices/You probably write emails. Like, all the time. You also receive emails. A lot of them, probably. Most emails you read, and probably most emails you write, suck. Here&rsquo;s some tips to make them suck less./posts/the-simple-feature-prioritisation-framework/Fri, 20 Jan 2023 00:00:00 +0000/posts/the-simple-feature-prioritisation-framework/Someone I know wanted to talk because they were very confused. They had the problem of being somewhat successful with their side project, and now were getting overwhelmed by the million different directions they could drive things towards. Should they develop more cool features? Should they double down and make the existing features even better? […]/posts/5-things-i-carry-every-day/Thu, 19 Jan 2023 00:00:00 +0000/posts/5-things-i-carry-every-day/I’m always wildly curious about what people carry around to make their day easier, or just in case they need something in an emergency or in an unexpected situation./posts/three-types-of-meetings/Wed, 18 Jan 2023 00:00:00 +0000/posts/three-types-of-meetings/I had a long day yesterday at work. This happens occasionally, when we need to have long meetings across multiple continents. So, I&rsquo;ll keep it short. And about meetings. If you ask most people, they&rsquo;ll agree: meetings suck so hard they could be patented by Dyson. Yet, we spend a ton of times in meetings […]/posts/moore-s-law-more-exponential-exploration/Tue, 17 Jan 2023 00:00:00 +0000/posts/moore-s-law-more-exponential-exploration/You might recall that exponential growth is really super crazy fast. This is true with rice on chessboards, with interest rates, and with pandemics among other things. Oh, and with computers. If you&rsquo;re even slightly interested in computer stuff, you probably have heard about Moore&rsquo;s Law. Gordon Moore turned 94 a couple of weeks ago, […]/posts/the-astonishing-exponential-growth/Mon, 16 Jan 2023 00:00:00 +0000/posts/the-astonishing-exponential-growth/You probably heard it a million times: &rsquo;this is growing exponentially!&rsquo;. That&rsquo;s often used to mean, &rsquo;this is growing really fast&rsquo;. But most people struggle with getting the feel of how actually fast exponential is. There is a very old story you probably know in some form or another. Here&rsquo;s my version. Once upon a […]/posts/two-point-job-descriptions/Fri, 13 Jan 2023 00:00:00 +0000/posts/two-point-job-descriptions/You can always summarize a job role into two bullet points. That&rsquo;s it. There will be more nuance and complexity, but when uncertainty strikes, you can always refer back to those two points./posts/6-things-i-learned-managing-people/Thu, 12 Jan 2023 00:00:00 +0000/posts/6-things-i-learned-managing-people/I’ve been managing teams on and off for more than 10 years. It came with a lot of lessons and brought a lot of humility. Here are 6 things I have learned about team leadership./posts/hello-world/Sun, 01 Jan 2023 00:00:00 +0000/posts/hello-world/One Christmas morning – must have been more than 30 years ago – my dad produced a box. In the box, was a Commodore 64. The 8 bit home computer was the first computing machine that made it into our home, back in a pre-internet era.