Nicolas Rosado

Senior Software Engineer | Father of twin girls | Meetups Organizer

Hi everyone, no need for me to have a digital twin because I'm already a father of twin girls! I have been a passionate software engineer for more than 13 years, and I love sharing and learning with the community.

I launched the Craftcode podcast, a show about tech trends and demystifying IT principles, and I contribute to the community by co-organizing the Software Crafters Montreal Meetup and the /dev/mtl conference. I also organize two online meetups: Mental Health in Software Engineering Montreal and AI Agents Montreal.

I'm a fervent advocate of software craftsmanship values. The most important one for me is the community of professionals and the building of sustainable software.

I'm an optimist by nature, and for me one step is more important than many words. Experimentation is great and we should embrace it, but it is useless without feedback from the community, and this requires sharing and humility. So experiment through concrete actions and trust the process by embracing continuous improvement.

Take care of yourself, but you also need to evolve in a strong learning environment, and the prerequisite is psychological safety. You need to be able to identify toxic environments in order to innovate.

Every day I apply concrete methods to be effective, like the 5-minute rule to start and create momentum, or the 3-minute rule to reduce cognitive load by immediately doing any task that takes less than three minutes.

I also embrace the Toltec agreements: always do your best, don't take anything personally, and don't make assumptions.

Harry Potter is not at the right place with me. Computer science is binary, and I like to understand systems in depth in order to navigate inside and around them. No place for mystery - identify the root cause.

Today I focus on sharing best practices and tools around AI. I especially value methods that foster sociable programming and collective knowledge. The team is collectively responsible, and it's better to have five teammates working as a team than one team with five people working in isolation.

In the era of AI, I'm looking for a human-centric approach with a culture of mistakes and a culture of feedback.

AI is an opportunity to spread software craftsmanship principles because it's the only way to deal with this new level of abstraction without being overwhelmed. Take care of your mental health. Humility and respect are my core values, especially in the era of AI.

I signed the ACG manifesto because I believe we need core principles to draw guidelines around AI, gather a community, and give ourselves the opportunity to go in the right direction.

Just start and we will see the result. You can spend more energy reflecting on whether to begin than you would by simply starting and seeing what happens. You can learn a lot just by doing it. Don't increase your cognitive load or damage your mental health with infinite tasks or plans in your head. Trust the feedback loop and the human in the loop.