Keep coding

One thing I never stopped doing since working as an Engineer Manager / Project Leader is working on side projects. Within the company itself and also on the side, just for me. I think that EMs should keep their skills up to date by writing code from time to time.

I am not for coding on the critical path at work, but rather on side initiatives as we tend to have clustered agendas that can leave few spaces to do so. While at VTEX, I used to work on the Design System's maintenance and also on the monitoring of our main app within the Admin team.

Outside daily work, I think it is good to experiment, try new things and have a side project or two to tweak and maintain.

There are a lot of articles out there about writing code within Engineering Management positions so I will keep it short in this post.

In that way, I recently built a super simple frontend app: Vite Es Verbs (opens in a new tab).

It's built on Vite (opens in a new tab) and React to perform super-fast searches of Spanish verbs. Since I need those on a daily basis at Mercado Livre to write and speak with coworkers based in Argentina or Colombia, it is super useful to not have to load tons of ads on other sites I used for this. I am also testing an alternative to GA with Mixpanel (opens in a new tab).