Benito Bertoli

Refactoring is overrated. Most teams treat code cleanliness like a moral good - a sign you are doing software the "right way." I disagree. What I see working with founders and product teams is this: refactors are often a hedge against uncertainty. We polish because we don't want to make the hard product decision. We defer user research behind cleaner folders and prettier interfaces. I've watched apps with beautiful abstractions fail because nobody validated the core interaction. Slow, careful code sometimes buys confidence. But it also buys time to avoid learning. You don't need a perfect architecture to prove value. You do need production behavior, fast feedback loops, and the humility to change something that already exists. Engineers hate this sentence and product teams cheer it. Founders get nervous. Instrumentation matters more than purity. Shipping a messy toggle with analytics is more useful than a polished rollout without data. I'm not saying ignore maintainability. I'm saying be deliberate about what you clean and why. When product-market fit is unclear, polished code is the perfect hiding place. I keep pushing teams to instrument before they refactor. Curious how others balance the trade-offs. I'm still figuring out where the line is. #webdev #product #founders #engineering

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👏 JUST IN: OpenAI announced a few important updates during their Dev Day an hour ago. Here is everything you need to know: - A new no-code platform for everyone to create agentic workflows. And AgentKit for developers - A way to create “Apps” within ChatGPT and an “App store” to come later this year - A list of Apps already available eg Hubspot and Canva, Coursera - GPT-5 pro and a small voice model are now available in the API - New video tool Sora 2 is also available in the API - A major partnership with AMD to purchase chips One interesting trend : want to guess which public company share price will go up? Just watch OpenAI partnership announcements. Last week OpenAI sent Shopify soaring and today: AMD (29%), Hubspot (7%) and Coursera (3%). (Not a financial advice of course) ----- 👉 Follow Will Liang for more and hit the 🔔 to stay ahead. 👉 DM me to chat through how AI apply to your business.

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"We can just use the API and build it ourselves" is this year's most expensive sentence in enterprise tech. The conversation always starts the same way. "Why pay for this? We have engineers. We can just use LLMs and codegen to build exactly what we need." 6 months later, the project is still not in production. They have a prototype that works in demos, but it keeps breaking with real data.   The prompts behave unpredictably, debugging takes days because nobody has deep experience with production AI systems. Meanwhile, the engineers who were supposed to build features spent half a year rebuilding what specialized vendors already solved. The opportunity cost adds up fast. People underestimate what production-ready AI requires. Calling an API is easy. Error handling, monitoring, prompt management, evaluation frameworks, and iteration based on real usage are the hard parts. The question I keep coming back to is what is core to your business versus what someone else already solved. Sometimes buying the infrastructure means your team can focus on actual differentiation.

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React 19 just quietly killed one of the most “senior” React skills. For years, we flexed with: • useMemo • useCallback • React.memo We called it “performance optimization.” Reality? Most devs weren’t optimizing. They were 𝗰𝗮𝗿𝗴𝗼-𝗰𝘂𝗹𝘁𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗽𝗲𝗿𝗳𝗼𝗿𝗺𝗮𝗻𝗰𝗲. ⚙️ Enter: 𝗥𝗲𝗮𝗰𝘁 𝗖𝗼𝗺𝗽𝗶𝗹𝗲𝗿 Instead of you hinting React… It: • Analyzes your code at build time • Tracks dependencies automatically • Injects memoization where it actually matters No dependency arrays. No stale closures. No overthinking. Before (React 18 mindset): “I need to stabilize this… memo that… wrap this…” After (React 19 mindset): “Write clean, pure components.” That’s it. But here’s what most people are missing 👇 🚨 The compiler skips bad code. If your component: • Mutates props • Reads random external state • Breaks hook rules → You get ZERO optimization. No warning in your UI. No obvious failure. Just slower components… and no clue why. So the shift isn’t: ❌ Memoization is dead ✅ 𝗕𝗮𝗱 𝗮𝗿𝗰𝗵𝗶𝘁𝗲𝗰𝘁𝘂𝗿𝗲 𝗶𝘀 𝗻𝗼𝘄 𝗲𝘅𝗽𝗼𝘀𝗲𝗱 New senior dev skillset: • Writing pure components • Designing predictable data flow • Understanding build-time optimization • Debugging why the compiler skipped your code Brutal truth: React didn’t remove complexity. It just moved it. From your code… to your architecture. --- 𝗪𝗿𝗶𝘁𝗲 𝗰𝗼𝗱𝗲 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗰𝗼𝗺𝗽𝗶𝗹𝗲𝗿 𝗰𝗮𝗻 𝘁𝗿𝘂𝘀𝘁. Adapt— or keep debugging problems the compiler already solved. #reactjs #javascript #webdevelopment #frontend #softwareengineering #react19 #programming

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I spent 2 months trying to hire a developer in Poland for my AI automation agency.   $1,300 in legal fees. 47 emails with lawyers. Zero progress.   Then I found out 35,000+ companies (including Shopify, Nike, and Reddit) solve this in hours using Deel.   Here's what you should know about global hiring in 2025:   The Old Way (What I Did): → Research local labor laws for days → Set up legal entities ($50K+ per country) → Find local payroll providers → Navigate compliance nightmares → Wait 2+ months to hire ONE person → Pay lawyers more than the actual employee   The Deel Way: → Click hire → Deel handles compliance in 150+ countries → Employee onboarded in 48 hours → Done.   They own 250+ legal entities worldwide. That means they can directly hire in Paris, Singapore, or São Paulo without middlemen.   When you're building AI agents and automation systems, your best talent is global. Ukrainian ML engineers. Brazilian developers. Indian AI researchers.   Deel processes $22B in payroll annually because they solved the one problem every growing company faces: hiring the best people, regardless of location.   They just raised $300M. While everyone chased AI unicorns, Deel quietly built a $17.3B empire solving payroll. Not because hiring is sexy. Because removing friction from global work is the future.   By 2030, NOT being able to hire globally will feel as outdated as dial-up internet.   The Real Innovation:   Deel just launched Anytime Pay. Your team members can access their earned wages instantly, multiple times per month. No more waiting for payday. No more late fees. No predatory payday loans at 40% interest.   78% of workers would struggle if their paycheck was delayed just one week. Deel spent 4 years building the infrastructure to end that.   Over to you: What's stopping you from hiring globally right now?   Drop a comment "DEEL" - I'll share the exact process I use to build remote AI teams across 6 countries.

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I'm not able to review mobile app code like a senior iOS/Android engineer can. So at The Local Europe, I built a review system that doesn't depend on me pretending I can. The rule is simple: AI can draft. AI can review. Humans approve. Always! Mobile is too important for retention to "hope for the best". And with a small team, we don't have specialists for every stack, so we built guardrails that scale. Every PR goes through: - automated first-pass AI review (catch obvious risks early), - developer fixes + updates, - final human approval + release decision. And yes, we hit the classic issue early - AI reviews were stateless. PR updates looked like "new PRs". We fixed that, so the AI sees the full context and follow-up changes are part of the same conversation. This doesn't replace engineering judgment. It makes quality repeatable. If you run lean teams, what’s your best guardrail when you can’t personally be the expert in every part of the stack? #EngineeringLeadership #Mobile #Quality #AI

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SaaS is not dying. The software that hands you a tool and still makes you do the whole job yourself is dying. And this week someone put a price on it, AGAIN. Miro sold to Bending Spoons for 1.36 billion dollars. In 2022 it was worth 17.5 billion. That is a 90 percent haircut. A week earlier the same buyer closed Airtable for 1.285 billion. Forbes called it unicorns selling for scraps, and most people read it as the funeral for SaaS. They read it wrong. Miro still runs about 600 million dollars in recurring revenue, almost all of it enterprise. The product did not die. The 2022 valuation did. What broke is the model underneath it: Software you rent by the seat, priced by how many people you let touch the tool. While your team still does every bit of the real work by hand. That is the part nobody says out loud. You pay a hefty license, and then you pay again. A consultant, an implementation project, months of onboarding, just to use the thing you already bought. The next winners will not sell you a tool. They will run the job. End-to-end. Not a nicer dashboard for one niche, but an agent that runs the entire operational flow of that niche, so every person in it moves with no blockers. That is the harder bet we are making with Klipy, our AI CRO - the AI agent that runs your entire sales operation. It is not one more place to log your deals. It does the logging, the follow-up, the busywork itself, so nobody on the team is stuck feeding a tool. It is much harder to build. It is also the most fun I have had since we started. https://lnkd.in/emCRzuJ6

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Almost everyone in tech struggles with imposter syndrome. Irina Nazarova runs one of the most respected Rails agencies in the world. And she started as a C++ engineer who didn't think she was good enough. Everybody feels like someone else is always ahead. Always succeeding at a bigger scale. We can never be good enough. But that's actually what pushes us to grow. It keeps us humble. It reminds us not to underestimate anyone. Because everyone has an imperfect story. And everyone is struggling with something. Watch the full episode: https://lnkd.in/ecudEvuu

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