Technology

To Vector, or not to Vector, that is the Question

Monday, Nov 24, 2025

Ricardo Ferreira

12 minute read

What AI Coding Assistants Have in Common with iRobot Roomba?

Sunday, Jan 5, 2025

In 2010, I purchased my first iRobot Roomba, the 700 series model launched that year. It promised to revolutionize automated cleaning, a claim repeatedly made since the device’s initial release in 2002. Unaware of previous models’ shortcomings, I was captivated by the promises of this new version. I recall reading about patented features like the Dirt Detect Technology™ and built-in integration with voice assistants. All of which seemed incredibly innovative at the time.

Ricardo Ferreira

7 minute read

How to Create more Effective Developer Content

Thursday, Mar 24, 2022

Let’s say you create developer content for a living. In that case, chances are that you work in one of those fancy jobs titles like Developer Advocacy, Community Management, Product Technical Marketing, Program Management, and many others. Regardless of your title, what is essential is for you to apply effectiveness to your content, which means that you do want that your content targets the right audience and be as relevant as possible. This blog post will discuss how you can accomplish this by using a technique that I affectionately call the 🔺 triangle. This technique is about making your content focus on the different ways people learn, creating the appropriate relevancy by linking them together, and helping scale the content promotion.

Ricardo Ferreira

8 minute read

How to Help People in Community Forums Like a Boss

Thursday, Mar 4, 2021

Whether it is part of your job description or not, helping users in community forums is always a great idea if you work for a company representing a given technology, product, or service. The key idea is to make sure that users don’t struggle.

But how do you know when and how users are struggling? Well, there are arguably many sources where you can get this information from, such as your support channel, your partners, and your consultancy department, if there is any. Just talk to them periodically and understand where the customers struggle the most. But another one that is becoming fundamental in today’s industry is community forums.

Ricardo Ferreira

5 minute read

Excluding Files from a List in Terraform

Saturday, Oct 10, 2020

Since the introduction of the for_each feature in Terraform 0.12 it is now possible to code powerful constructs to express the logic of your infrastructure. But sometimes you have to use some creativity to use this feature. I recently had to write a Terraform code that could upload all the JavaScript files from a local folder into a storage blob in Azure. But one of these files would have some template expressions so I wanted to upload all the files from the local folder except that one — because I would upload it individually.

Ricardo Ferreira

2 minute read

Troubleshooting 101

Friday, Jul 31, 2020

Part of my job as Developer Advocate is to reach out to developers in social forums like Stackoverflow, Reddit, and Slack communities to check whether I can provide help. While I feel great pleasure in doing this, it is getting harder and harder to help people these days.

I have the feeling that developers these days don’t know (or perhaps forgot or pretend that they forgot) how to perform basic troubleshooting. Every time I see a request for help in a forum usually people barely explain what the problem is, how it occurs, give evidence of what happened before the incident and, more importantly, to provide a minimal explanation of their environment.

Ricardo Ferreira

6 minute read