I am an Italian tech founder and software engineer, currently living in Lisbon. I love building products that people use every day.
Currently, I am working on Typefully, an AI-powered writing app for social media with hundreds of thousands of users worldwide.
In the past I also worked on various other projects:
- Mailbrew - Personal email digests (excited!)
- Unreadit - Semi-automated newsletters based on Reddit
- Boxy Suite - Expanded Boxy into a suite with subscription
- Boxy - Mac web wrapper for Gmail Inbox
- Libretto - Grades tracking app
I have a background in engineering and computer science and was employee number 30 at Bending Spoons, before leaving to do my own startups.
Writing
This kinda exploded. The consensus: stop testing if someone can write code. AI can do that. Start testing if they can work with AI, know when it's wrong, and make good architectural decisions. The most interesting ideas from the replies: 1️⃣ Real codebase work 2-3 hour sessions implementing a feature in your actual repo. AI tools allowed. 2️⃣ Discuss trade-offs instead of watching them code Pick parts of their solution and dig into why they made certain choices. You learn way more about their understanding. 3️⃣ Paid short-term trials Work with 2-3 candidates part-time on real tasks. Pay them properly. Then decide. The questions you should be asking: • Can they prompt effectively? • Do they know when AI output is garbage? • Can they handle ambiguity? • Do they understand architecture and trade-offs? • Can they debug and iterate on generated code? System design interviews got more valuable because AI is great at implementation but terrible at making higher-level decisions (not sure for how long). Behavioral stuff matters more now. References. Past work. How they talk about their decisions. So our plan: live coding session (implement something real with AI tools) + deep dive on past work + system design discussion. Still figuring this out, but the replies helped a lot. Thanks everyone!
We kicked off a little internal challenge at Typefully prompted by @rajatkapoor trying to post every day for 1 year (excluding weekends)! So far, so good! Hope to get as far as Huevo!
We'll be hiring some new software engineers in 2026 and it's crazy to think how much has changed since the last time we hired, 1.5 years ago. What does a modern interview process even look like now? Take-home assignments? AI can solve them. Live coding? Doesn't reveal much. How are forward-looking companies handling it?
