Where I've shown up

I took the stage at the Tech Hiring Community Conference 2026 in Lisbon to make a simple point: the engineering role has quietly changed. Technical skill went from being the differentiator to being the baseline, and business sense, communication, and AI fluency are the new edge. Most hiring processes haven't caught up.

The talk walked through what that shift means for how we screen, interview, and evaluate candidates today. I also got to hear firsthand from a room full of hiring leads and recruiters about what wasn't working on their end either.

Abundance Flow is a show about turning scarcity into abundance, and this episode was a deep dive into resilience. We talked about the years between Brazil and Portugal, the layoff that pushed me to build Candl, and the choices that come with being a father of five while running a company.

It's less about tactics and more about how setbacks actually reshape what you build next.

I joined a panel for Damia Group's webinar on AI in recruitment, alongside recruiters from Damia, Datadog, and SIXT. We covered the first survey of the Portuguese recruitment community on AI adoption, the tools recruiters are actually using day to day, and where AI helps sourcing and screening versus where it gets in the way.

At the time I was Head of Engineering at Snyk and building Candl.io on the side, so a lot of my angle was the hiring manager's side of the table, not just the recruiter's.

Manager.dev featured Candl.io as the closing piece in their 'EM-builder' series, about engineering managers who build software on the side. The piece walks through how three years of informal coaching turned into a real side project.

I talked about the moment in February 2025 when coaching alongside a head of engineering role at Snyk and five kids at home stopped being sustainable, and how I used a survey, LinkedIn polls, and my own client history to figure out what to build instead of giving up on the coaching entirely.

It also gets into the part people ask about most: how to build something on the side without hiding it from your employer, and what it actually took to keep it profitable while still doing the day job.

This is the first episode of Beyond the Code, the video companion to my newsletter. Alex Kliotzkin and I talked about what actually changes when an engineer moves into a leadership role, from developing a leadership philosophy to what hiring managers are really listening for in an interview.

We got into the practical side too: how to prepare for a leadership interview, the red flags worth watching for on both sides of the table, and why self-belief ends up mattering as much as preparation.

The second half of a webinar series for GDG Academy, hosted by Stefano Le Pera. This one covers building a LinkedIn profile that actually works, how to think about your own personal SEO, and what interviewers are really testing for at the intern and junior level.

We also went deep on the anatomy of a tech hiring process: the common stages, the common mistakes on both sides, and the two-sided approach behind the STRIVE framework.

We talked about what changes when a tech leader shifts focus from code to people. That covered building trust through vulnerability, giving feedback people can actually use, and what active listening looks like in practice, not just in theory.

A lot of this conversation ended up shaping parts of The Engineering Leadership Playbook.

The first half of a two-part webinar for GDG Academy. We got specific: the ideal CV format, how many pages is too many, and the practices that quietly get a resume rejected before a human ever reads it properly.

It's a companion piece to Part 2, which moves from the CV to the interview itself.

Stefano Le Pera and I talked about my day job leading engineering at Zendesk, and the career and leadership coaching I run alongside it. We also got into why I stay involved in the GDG community and what public speaking has taught me about communicating technical ideas to non-technical people.

One of my first podcast appearances. Stefano Le Pera and I talked about leading engineering at Tymeshift, how to foster the right culture inside a growing team, and why customer-centricity has to be an engineering habit, not just a product team slogan.