The Optimist Engineer

Why doing your job well is no longer enough to get a promotion

4 practical strategies to make the real impact of your technical work visible, without feeling like you’re showing off.

Nov 3 • Marcos F. Lobo 🗻🧭

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October 2026

The Experimentation Trap: Why Speed Needs Solid Engineering

How to build fast, skip the corporate bureaucracy, and keep your code clean

Oct 27 • Marcos F. Lobo 🗻🧭

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The AI Stack, Part 3: The Engine Room

GPUs, vLLM, and KV Caches: How you can scale AI infrastructure without going broke

Oct 20 • Marcos F. Lobo 🗻🧭

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The AI Stack, Part 2: The Art of Specialization

When prompts hit a wall: Fine-tuning, synthetic datasets, and inference tricks

Oct 13 • Marcos F. Lobo 🗻🧭

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[The A-Side] The AI Stack, Part 1: Building Product-First (#169)

Are you building AI products but feeling lost in the endless noise of new frameworks, hype, and technical terms?

Oct 6 • Marcos F. Lobo 🗻🧭

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September 2026

[The A-Side] Why you should stop giving your company unpaid overtime (#168)

The "honeymoon phase" feels great, but scaling changes who the company cares about

Sep 30 • Marcos F. Lobo 🗻🧭

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[The A-Side] The SPDD Workflow: From Story to Code (#167)

How to turn vague business requirements into a predictable engineering loop

Sep 22 • Marcos F. Lobo 🗻🧭

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[The A-Side] A Guide to SPDD: What is SPDD? Prompts as First-Class Artefacts (#166)

The industry is selling you a massive lie about AI coding assistants.

Sep 15 • Marcos F. Lobo 🗻🧭

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[The A-Side] From Junior to Tech Lead: Act Like the Role Before You Get the Title (#165)

Adaptability, real-world impact, and visible metrics: The practical blueprint for non-linear engineering growth

Sep 10 • Marcos F. Lobo 🗻🧭

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The Optimist Engineer V2

Evolution from a blog-like approach to a printed newsletter from the eighties.

Sep 8 • Marcos F. Lobo 🗻🧭

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August 2026

🌊 Summertime is here 2026 - get rest

August will be entirely for resting and recharging energy. You must do as well.

Aug 5 • Marcos F. Lobo 🗻🧭

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Building an Enterprise MCP Platform - Vol. III: Ironclad Access & Security

Tackling the critical challenges of authentication, authorization, and secure governance for internal AI protocol servers at scale.

Aug 4 • Marcos F. Lobo 🗻🧭

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