Dalmo Cirne

At the peak of a discussion, the loudest voice in a room is often the one who should be listening the most.

The smartest-person trap silence ideas, lower morale, and halt innovation faster than missed deadlines or budget cuts. Promoting your best, but unprepared engineer often demotes the entire team.

It doesn’t have to be like that. Learn a better way.

Companies are drowning in engineer resumes but starving for managers who can actually make those engineers deliver. The real bottleneck isn’t code or AI skills, it’s coordination. Headlines scream about tech talent shortages, yet the data tells a different story: great managers are as rare as a lighthouse keeper in the desert. Gallup says only 1 in 10 people have the natural talent to lead effectively. Promote internally without preparation? You often lose a brilliant engineer and gain a struggling manager.

Managers make strengths productive and weaknesses irrelevant. They work with the team on effectiveness and output. Without them, projects stall, effort becomes aimless, and morale plummets. The uncomfortable truth? We reward individual heroics so much that we treat management like a promotion trophy instead of a distinct craft.

If you’re a leader, IC eyeing management, or scaling a team, read this: investing in real management talent isn’t optional, it’s the multiplier that turns potential into results.

Have you seen executives talk to employees as if they were children? Good intentions aside, coddling damages far more than what they realize. Performance plummets, disengagement spreads, and the company and customers end up bearing the costs. But there’s a better way, and it’s not optional. Learn what great leaders do.

Nostalgia can be a trap, anchoring everyone to the past and signaling a lack of vision for the future. Clinging to the “good old days" is a failure to envision a future worth pursuing. Leaders take note: your job isn’t to relive the past but to work on a future worth building.

Learn when to let go of an outdated idea or when sticking to your guts. From Einstein’s biggest mistake to Darwin's theory of evolution. An idea may cost or define you.

These aren't just historical tales; they're a mental model for every leader navigating uncertainty, whether you're scaling a startup or at the helm of a Fortune 500 company. When do you double down, and when do you pivot?

Wanna try branchless programming for yourself? Check out the link at the end of this post.

Program execution is faster and more efficient when microprocessors can continuously fetch instructions from the cache. This is particularly important in High-Performance Computing (HPC) and Real-Time Systems (RTS), where execution times have to be predictable and not fluctuate. In the event of a cache miss, new instructions have to be fetched from RAM to repopulate the cache, causing performance to suffer.

The more predictable the execution path of a program, the better for performance. Branchless programming is a coding technique to minimize the number of possible execution branches. Think of if statements executing one part of the program or another; when the predicted code is in one branch, but the other branch needs to run, this causes inefficiencies and delays.

Working under a boss who seems untouchable, unaccountable, and unable to do their job will get you to consider switching teams or even companies. In "Blueprint of dysfunctional bosses," I examine the traits that tank morale, discourage innovation, and push talent out the door. From favoritism to reorgs and endless pivots, see how these bosses negatively impact teams and companies.

The mission of businesses is to create a positive change for customers. When successful, this can mean simpler processes, more efficient execution, faster transactions, lower costs, adoption of new habits, and other metrics.

But success depends on customers being willing to change, and that is no small feat. Change means facing the unknown, adopting the unproven, and struggling with uncertainty. It is intimidating.

A massive challenge for businesses is to offer change that people are ready to accept.

In 2007, people were used to physical keyboards on their mobile devices. Apple took a risk and offered on-screen keyboards, and today, it’s rare to see a cell phone with a dedicated keyboard. Conversely, Alphabet’s Google Glass, launched in 2014, was discontinued in 2015 due to privacy concerns and social awkwardness. People were repelled by the device and those who wore it.

Change comes with risk but also opportunity. For incumbents, it may grow your moat. For new entrants, you can move fast and outrun the existing competition.

What makes a mentor truly great? In "The Mentor’s Timeless Role in Shaping Leaders," I explore how mentors guide apprentices to reach their potential and become their best selves. From ancient tales in Greek mythology to modern corporations, discover the evolving mentor-apprentice relationship, strategies like deliberate practice, and the role of mentorship in forging the next generation of leaders. Whether you’re a seasoned manager or an aspiring professional, this essay offers insights why mentors are indispensable. Who are your mentors, and how did they shape you?

AI is a tool to amplify the work we do, not to replace it.

The ability to organize, lead, and execute is now more critical than ever.

It’s easy to think and dream, but turning those ideas into reality is really hard. It takes action, dedication, and persistence to bring a vision to life. Like planting a crop, it takes time to harvest the results.

Using the intuition of a recursive algorithm to understand factorials.

n! = n x (n - 1) x … x 2 x 1

Everyone claims to want change, but do they really?

Change means facing the unknown, learning new skills, and struggling with uncertainty. It can be intimidating.

But change brings opportunity. Incumbents are slow to adapt, leaving the door ajar for those ready to seize the chance. And if you’re the agent of change, the odds may be slightly in your favor, though there are no guarantees.

Change is like a treadmill: you gotta keep moving. When it happens, you face a choice: adapt and grow, or drown in excuses.

A visually intuitive way to understand Gauss’s formula for the sum of the first n positive integers.