I'm Dimitri, a software engineer since 2014 and a father since 2022.
I work at Agicap as an employee on a 4/5 basis and spend the rest of the time working with Ytreza.dev collective as a freelancer.

Lets kick off by telling you I'm pretty dull in terms of emotion. The good thing is, you can't make me mad or sad for that matter. The not-so-good one is that I struggle quite a bit with human behavior. I can conceive a lot of things but can only understand a few regarding human beings. This is a big WIP of my life, and it's pretty enjoyable, in fact, since I seek for everything I know I don't know.

Like almost everyone, I started my career reading long requirements specifications, signed by many so that everyone can cover their ass if things go sideways. While this process and mindset was of no fun, I enjoyed writing "quality" code, at least with the definition I had at that time. Too bad we worked for years running on investors' money and having barely one customer. Sounds familiar, right?

Not so long after, I learned about Clean Code, Clean Architecture and TDD. On the technical aspect, I began to understand how quality software should be built, that is to say, with very high maintainability in mind. A good thing for sure, but it won't solve the lack of customer part. If you have none, what purpose serves the software? Can we call it "software" then? To what change should it adapt to? And who asks for this change to occur? And why? Remember, there is no customer, so no feedback to drive this change.

During this journey, connections were made here and there. First, reading DDD introduced me to a deep understanding of the domain and the problem we aim to solve. Then learning about No-Estimate made total sense to me. It's by doing the thing that you know the time it takes. Dead simple. The next big step was the discovery of Lean Startup and that is when things got difficult, in a nice way. Everything connects. The feedback loop is indeed the key. We need to build around the best one we can come up with.

This is where I am now, trying everything I can to reduce this damn feedback loop with my team.

I trust everyone to act of kindness by default. Like Socrates, I believe that only the lack of knowledge can decide otherwise.

With that in mind, I myself act as such and often remind everyone we are the lucky ones, most likely born and living in a stable country, with a good salary, a roof above our heads, knowing we are going to eat tonight. The world is unfair and will remain for a long time. Nevertheless, as individuals, we don't need to wait for this to happen before changing our mindset.

This is the kind of mindset I try to spread.

On the technical side, I've been working in a .NET environment since 2014. I thrive on creating tools around tests, applying TDD to the best of my abilities. You won't hear me talk about programming languages, frameworks, libraries and so on. I'm far past the "technology" enthusiasm point. My comfort zone is software design. What it means is that I can talk about it tirelessly. You are the key for the discussion to stop if we argue about something related, without making any progress 🙏

On the collaborative side, I love pair / mob programming and even started experimenting with software teaming.

If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.

I also have a very strong appetite for the product, trying to find answers to:

• Why?
• Why now?
• What kind of feature is it? Activation, retention, etc.?
• What is going to dictate it being a success or a failure?
• How many days should we run this experiment before looking at our metrics?
• The list goes on 😅

• 🪚 Woodworking
• 🧗 Climbing but not soloing
• 🐝 Beekeeping hopefully soon