Welcome to Tiago's Newsletter: What You Can Expect

Hey, welcome. Really glad you're here.

This is the first issue of my newsletter, and I want to keep it simple. Just a quick intro, what you can expect going forward, and a look at what I've been writing lately.

Who I Am

My name is Tiago and I'm a Software Engineer based in Canada. In the past year I have been working on ETL pipelines, backend systems, and web tooling. Outside of work and my side projects, I do a lot of Mountain Biking, reading and occasionally disappear on road trips.

I've been writing on my blog tiagovalverde.com for a few years. It covers three areas I keep coming back to:

• Tech: tools, development practices, things I've built or broken
• Fitness: fitness, health, training, cycling
• Life: reflections, books, travel, the kind of stuff that does not fit a category

What This Newsletter Is For

The blog is where I publish posts. This newsletter is where I surface the ones worth your time, share what I'm thinking, and occasionally write things that are too short for a full article.

Expect one issue every few weeks.

What I've Been Writing Since January

Here are some of the latest posts worth catching up on:

Tech

• March 31 Was a Wake-Up Call for the Dev Ecosystem - a look at the Axios npm compromise, the Claude Code leak, and what both incidents say about dependency trust
• How to Reduce Token Consumption with Claude Code and Codex - the habits that keep AI coding sessions useful without burning context or budget
• Spec-Driven Development in Practice: A Walkthrough with Spec Kit - how I used spec-driven development inside a real Next.js codebase
• Performance Tracing with Chrome DevTools MCP and The AI Agent - how I tracked down real performance issues with an AI agent driving DevTools

Fitness

• Cyclocross Was a Different Beast - a recap of my first cyclocross season and why it hurt more than I expected

Life

• Nine Days in Mexico - a quick travel recap from the Riviera Maya
• Frankenstein: A Few Thoughts - notes on ambition, responsibility, and the cost of refusing to face what you created

Tools I've Been Using

A few things that have genuinely improved how I work recently:

• Codex & Claude - the coding agents I have been using most for hands-on repo work, refactors, and production fixes
• Spec Kit - a spec-driven workflow tool I built to bring more structure to AI-assisted development
• Chrome DevTools MCP - an MCP server that lets an AI agent drive browser DevTools for performance tracing
• Supabase - Postgres, Auth, and Storage in one, and the backbone of a lot of my experiments
• Ollama - a simple way to run local models and experiment without depending on hosted APIs for everything
• Ruby on Rails - still one of the most enjoyable ways I know to build quickly on the web and get real features shipped without a lot of ceremony
• n8n - great for automations, integrations, and glue work between services when I do not want to hand-roll every workflow from scratch
• Spring - a framework I have been using a lot at work, especially for backend services where structure, conventions, and long-term maintainability matter
• Obsidian - still my favorite note-taking app, and the Web Clipper extension made it much easier to save articles, ideas, and research in one place
• Cursor - I have been trying to get exposure to as many AI coding tools, agents, and models as possible, and Cursor has been part of that comparison
• SQLite - one of the best tools for quick apps, prototypes, and experiments when you want a real database without adding operational weight

That's it for issue one. If you have a question, a topic you'd like me to cover, or just want to say hi, reply to this email. I read everything.

See you in the next one.

Tiago