The Optimist Engineer

Does your developers need another MCP?

Many Platform Engineering teams are creating MCP for their dev team but, when is it a good idea?

Feb 18 • Marcos F. Lobo 🗻🧭

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OpenCost: what it is, what it fixes, and where it stands today

A practical rundown for platform engineers building cloud-native apps

Feb 11 • Marcos F. Lobo 🗻🧭

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Playbook - How to become (and be seen as) a Staff Engineer

A practical one-page playbook to stop waiting for promotion and start building evidence

Feb 4 • Marcos F. Lobo 🗻🧭

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January 2026

3 Steps To Demonstrate You Are Up For Staff Engineer Role

Act as the role you pursuit, and then the promotion will come

Jan 28 • Marcos F. Lobo 🗻🧭

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Software Architecture for ETLs

Hexagonal, MVC, Layers, custom, ... I tend to keep it simple

Jan 21 • Marcos F. Lobo 🗻🧭

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Writing about Software Development

How I organize my time for writing

Jan 14 • Marcos F. Lobo 🗻🧭

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December 2025

Building a Product Platform Engineering Team

You must help yourself before helping others

Dec 17, 2025 • Marcos F. Lobo 🗻🧭

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The Hidden Force Slowing Your Deploys

Uncover the silent dependency trap that keeps your applications from reaching production effortlessly

Dec 10, 2025 • Marcos F. Lobo 🗻🧭

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How to Keep Your Hard-Earned Engineering Lessons Forever

Knowledge drives you, why lose it when you change job?

Dec 3, 2025 • Marcos F. Lobo 🗻🧭

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November 2025

Do you need an Interface?

Most likely no, and I tell you why

Nov 26, 2025 • Marcos F. Lobo 🗻🧭

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Start Small, Scale Smart: The Real Value of Incremental Architecture

A practical guide to designing software that can evolve as fast as you do

Nov 19, 2025 • Marcos F. Lobo 🗻🧭

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Enabling developers to take ownership of the Platform Infrastructure

Enter Crossplane

Nov 12, 2025 • Marcos F. Lobo 🗻🧭

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