Yuleidy González

It’s frustrating to see that the productivity gap between Canada and other advanced economies has widened in recent years. Meanwhile it’s inspirational seeing how advanced technology is being applied in other countries. While most Canadians are busy debating affordability, lowering taxes or increasing minimum wages, more attention can be paid on using technology to truly improve standard of living by increasing productivity. I don’t think there’s a shortage of talents or inventions coming from Canadians, but actual productization and commercialization of technology does not seem to occur frequently enough in Canada. What can individuals like myself do? Aside from working on products to help businesses identify and close productivity gaps, one thing I can think of is to bring back and share experience I have in the industry back to the university. Hopefully this could align students’ expectations and inspire better collaboration between academics and commercial application of technology. Do you agree? What would you suggest?

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Canada has something Silicon Valley doesn't. A pan-Canadian community of 3,200+ senior tech leaders. Volunteer-led. Unsponsored. No agenda but helping each other execute faster. We don't optimize for eyeballs. We optimize for trust. The result? Real-time signal on what actually works. Peer-tested frameworks. The kind of collective intelligence that only emerges when status signaling is off the table. Communities don't scale by adding more people. They scale by deepening trust per node. When senior operators can ask the hardest questions without pretense, the entire ecosystem moves faster. That's the Canadian advantage. Not louder. Deeper.

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🧢 Platform engineers aren’t just building tools. They’re building products. At PlatformCon 2025, our CTO and co-founder Ganesh Datta made the case for why platform teams need to think like product managers. His talk covers: ✔️ How to design for adoption, not just availability ✔️ Why golden paths are only valuable if they’re opinionated ✔️ What product management failure modes look like in platform teams ✔️ The metrics that actually show you’re making an impact This is how great platforms get built. Don’t miss it. 🎥 Watch the full session → https://lnkd.in/guE__kYB

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You might need a new CTO soon. If your CTO recklessly uses AI everywhere, you'll either (A) burn your customers (B) get into maintenance & bug hell or (C) don't save a single dime but instead put most of your resources on QA. Be smart. Leverage AI, but don't do so recklessly. -- PS: We build software that actually scales and is being used.

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Your CI/CD bill is not exploding because of “expensive runners,” it is bleeding out through flaky tests, over-parallelized jobs, and slow feedback loops that quietly tax every deploy This piece shows you how to redesign pipelines so you cut compute waste, shrink queues, and speed up developer flow without adding yet another approval gate or YAML religion Full breakdown in the comments. #DevOps #CICD #PlatformEngineering

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Pull Requests shouldn’t feel like this. We’ve all opened a large PR review and thought: “Well... this is going to hurt.” Sure, small PRs are great, but sometimes you need the full picture. That’s where stacked PRs help (been using Graphite for that, a tool for managing PRs and code reviews). Stacked PRs treat your feature development as a chain of commits / PRs layered on top of each other. Think of it like a Jenga tower: each block (PR) builds on top of the previous one. pr1 → main pr2 → pr1 pr3 → pr2 Now it’s getting even better. I just got early access to Graphite Chat 👇 - I can literally ask it “what’s going on in this PR?” and it gives me the full story, codebase history, past PRs, even outside context. - I can just highlight it and ask “explain this”, instant breakdown. - Flags risks before reviewers even show up. - When someone leaves feedback, it helps me make sense of it and suggests fixes. - And the best part? When CI blows up, I can just ask “why did this break?” and actually get an answer. I’ll even be able to pop open the Graphite Editor right inside Chat to view and edit the codebase. Reviews feel lighter, more collaborative. Exactly how they should.

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I would rather leave a seat open than hire brilliance without humility. At Wealthsimple, an Engineering Manager candidate had Yes across the loop, including a Strong Yes. In the debrief, the team said “They knew a lot” and “They could do the job,” yet people were uneasy. I translated that discomfort into concrete behaviors and went into the final leadership interview to probe it. I came out a Strong No. We didn't hire them. “Culture add” is not vibes. It is observable behaviour tied to values. Patterns I watch for (ego tells): - Heavy “I” with little credit to others. Probing reveals they took credit for work they didn’t do. - How they frame partners and peers. I want to hear: “My PM partner was new, so we worked closely to scope well and keep stakeholders informed.” Not: “My PM was new, so I basically did their job too.” - Redirecting questions to flex unrelated knowledge instead of engaging with what was asked. From a colleague’s notes on a past candidate: - “They used questions as a segue into unrelated demonstrations of knowledge.” - “When I tried to collaborate and shift to go back to the question, they branched off again.” Bottom line: Hire for culture traits you value, like humility, with the same rigor you use for technical skill. Be specific. Train interviewers on what to listen for. Protect the team by holding the line. #hiring #leadership #engineeringmanagement #cultureadd #humility #ego #teambuilding

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Engineering teams move fast. Their spending system should not slow them down. Meet vlt technology inc., a developer tools company working across Toronto, Montreal, Phoenix and San Francisco. They outgrew a single corporate card and switched to Venn to bring real structure to their spend. What changed: - Virtual cards for each team and tool, each with clear ownership - Budgets and controls that keep spending predictable - A USD account that removes conversion fees on invoices - Real-time visibility across every category and currency - Faster month-end work with clean receipts and categorizations Their team now runs their expenses on a system actually built for them.

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Documenting a recent infrastructure win because I wish I’d seen more posts like this when I was figuring this stuff out. We run data pipelines that process medical charts and generate codes (CPT, ICD, HCC). The old architecture was SQS-based with worker pools. It worked, but visibility was terrible. Charts would hang or fail silently, and we’d have no idea what happened to them. We migrated everything to Temporal. Game changer for observability. Now I have full traces of every workflow, every agent call with its prompts and outputs, every processing step. OpenTelemetry integration pipes everything to Datadog. Debugging went from “let me spend 3 hours in logs” to “here’s exactly what happened.” Then I built an MCP server that queries both Datadog and Temporal. Ask it about a failed chart, get the root cause in seconds. Connected that to Cursor. Now when something breaks, the flow is: identify failed chart → MCP surfaces the issue → AI suggests fix → push code → validate chart processes → done. End-to-end debugging and fixing that used to take a day now takes under an hour, sometimes just minutes. Not trying to sell anything here, just sharing what worked for me. Happy to talk details if anyone’s going through similar infrastructure decisions.

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There’s something powerful about engineers driving product strategy; not just building what’s spec’d, but shaping what gets built. Last week at Atolio's offsite in Vancouver, we planned the next evolution of our product; across everything from distributed search systems to customer facing UX. What stood out wasn’t just the architecture discussions or deep dives into indexing performance. It was the Atolio mindset in full effect. ⚙️ Deep product intuition: Engineers who know why we’re building, not just how 🙋‍♂️ Ownership culture: “I’ll take that” wasn’t rare, it was the norm 🧠 High-agency execution: Thinking through second and third order effects ⚖️ Respect for balance: Across systems, priorities, and team capacity We walked out with a clear, prioritized roadmap and real shared ownership, no layers of process, just engineers building with purpose. If you care about solving hard problems in search, infra, and ML with autonomy and impact this is what we’re building at Atolio. #EngineeringCulture #SearchInfrastructure #DistributedSystems #StartupEngineering #ProductLedEngineering #LLMs #Ownership #Golang #InfraEngineering #LifeAtAtolio

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