# Blog

By Valentin Galfré · Updated 2026-10-23 · https://galfrevn.com/blog

Essays and notes by Valentin Galfré, from staff engineering and web performance to a hackathon shop that answers at two in the morning.

- [A shop that answers at two in the morning](https://galfrevn.com/writing/my-first-hackathon) (2026-09-17): Twenty-four hours in Santa Fe, my brother on the other keyboard, and a product for my father: photograph what you want to sell and get a shop with an employee that negotiates for you.
- [The direction, not the plan](https://galfrevn.com/writing/what-is-next) (2026-09-09): Not a plan. The direction I would like to be walking: agents that touch the world, a product that stays honest, a degree I am going to finish.
- [Every garment in a photo](https://galfrevn.com/writing/photo-search) (2026-09-09): How pilcha finds every garment in a photo and returns the closest thing an Argentine store sells right now. Mostly plumbing.
- [Invisible engineering](https://galfrevn.com/writing/invisible-engineering) (2026-09-09): The best software is the one nobody talks about. Why excellence that goes unnoticed is the hardest to sell and the most valuable to build.
- [Code now has two readers](https://galfrevn.com/writing/two-readers) (2026-09-09): Humans and models read the same file. What changes in how we name, shape and document code when the second reader has no context and no coffee.
- [Competing against yesterday](https://galfrevn.com/writing/competing-against-yesterday) (2026-09-09): Being competitive without stepping on anyone. The only useful comparison is with your own system from last week.
- [Staff Engineer without a manual](https://galfrevn.com/writing/staff-engineer-without-a-manual) (2026-09-09): Nobody in a startup tells you what a Staff Engineer does. How I defined the role: platform, AI, vendor decisions, and the hard conversations nobody else wanted.
- [Microfrontends that let you sleep](https://galfrevn.com/writing/microfrontends-that-let-you-sleep) (2026-09-09): What it takes for eight teams to deploy independently on Latin America's highest-traffic platform without waking anyone up.
- [Performance on surfaces the whole country sees](https://galfrevn.com/writing/performance-the-whole-country-sees) (2026-09-09): Optimizing when every millisecond is measured in sales. Method over heroics on Mercado Libre's busiest pages.
- [The tests nobody asked for](https://galfrevn.com/writing/tests-nobody-asked-for) (2026-09-09): Joining a software factory as the most junior engineer and fixing the thing nobody had time for: every release broke something that used to work.