Writing tip #4 Using similar grammatical patterns for similar ideas, creates flow and cohesion.

Writing tip #3 Sharp moments deserve short sentences. Slow moments deserve longer ones. Rhythm reveals meaning.

Writing tip #2 “To be” sentences are boring. Swap them for actions that move.

Writing is a skill you can brute force. While building Fika, I’m teaching myself to write by obsessively reading, listening, and dissecting everything I can. For the next 30 days, I’ll share what I'm learning, one writing tip per day. Writing tip #1 Prefer concrete verbs over abstract summaries.

I've noticed people use AI in two completely different ways: 1. Draw the two circles 2. Draw the rest of the fucking owl I'm fully convinced the first one wins every time. When you draw the circles yourself, you’re forced to think. Otherwise, you just keep pulling the lever hoping for a jackpot.

I've just finished my third and final article about hiring. This one is about scaling recruiting, operationally. Most teams struggle because their process can’t handle volume. So I break down: • interview bandwidth • conversion rates • how to model org charts paoramen.fika.bar/how-to-scale...

One of the hardest parts of building Fika has been letting go. I spent two years shaping a side project, and now I’m throwing most of it away because Fika is becoming something different. It hurts more than I expected. You get irrationally attached to old decisions without noticing.

I just wrote my most detailed article ever. It breaks down the entire recruiting pipeline I used to hire 150+ engineers with a single recruiter. From lead generation to closing: every step, tricks, questions, templates... If you think hiring engineers is hard, read this!

"Generative AI is so good, you can't tell anymore what images are real or not" I present you, the 4x3 rubik cube.

I've assembled the weirdest founding team: Two engineers and a growth hacker. Why? Because in 2025, building products is cheap but attention is expensive. So my hypothesis is that you need: - one engineer building product - one engineer building growth - one person harnessing the attention markets

I want more human-written content on the Internet. So bad that I hand-drew this entire animation, frame by frame, just to make you click on the damn button.

In the last two years, the #1 thing people have asked me was how I hired at Factorial. I've shared my playbook again and again, so I decided to write it once and for all. It got… long. So I turned it into a 3-chapter series on Fika. Enjoy! paoramen.fika.bar/the-talent-m...

I can vividly hear the conversation between the growth PM and the product designer: "I don't care about your stupid padding. It's bigger, it converts more."

Webflow is frustratingly 5 features/bugs away from being perfect.

LLMs are surprisingly bad at inventing new words. You’d expect a model that’s digested all language to be great at branding. But no, they spit out tongue-twisters and gibberish. Barkple, Ispuina... Terklo? Maybe it’s tokenization (as always), or maybe it’s a side-effect of how they’re trained.

Earlier this year I dipped my toes into game design. It taught me a brutal truth: Tutorials are the hardest design problem. The best ones don’t explain: they let you play. I’ve rebuilt Fika’s onboarding with the same principle: No walkthroughs. No walls of text. You learn by doing.

The tech industry once revengefully belonged to nerds: kids bullied for being bad at sports but good at math. That’s changed. Now broccoli-haired weight lifters flood YC with AI startups. What’s left for the next generation of nerds?

Fika doesn’t even have a logo. I went digging for inspiration in old zines, risograph prints, tolkien's watercolors, pryca and the moomins. No relation among those items other than vibes. Here are some of the ideas that came out. Anything worth exploring further?

What bothers me the most about 996 is how confusing it is. The first two nines are very specific. It's not any 12 hours, is from 9am to 9pm. But then the 6 is super vague. What day am I supposed to rest? What if I come on Saturday and no one is there? Not clear. Why not 12x6?

Interactive articles are awesome. They turn abstract concepts into something you can see and play with. That’s now possible on fika. Authors can drop in interactive Snippets directly in their posts. I used it to run a double pendulum… and Doom. fika.bar/paoramen/can...

RSL is a new standard that extends HTML, RSS, and HTTP to enforce licensing. I argued in "AI is eating the internet" that the open web will collapse unless we find ways for creators to be compensated. Cloudflare’s pay-per-crawl was a patch. An open protocol is the real solution.

The new iPhone lineup feels like Pro = masculine, Air = feminine. Are we quietly sliding back into gendered marketing?

I'm sorry Apple but no, you are not Teenage Engineering.

The next version of Fika will have interactive snippets! This means that you will be able to create interactive articles with some dynamic blocks. Why am I building this? Honestly, for myself. I'm writing an article about hiring, and I want to show how an org-chart simulator.

Games are the best intelligence benchmarks (until we manage to quantify humor)

Search "Forrest Gump" in Google. You are welcome!

Atlassian acquiring The browser company.

I suspect Google went with "don't be evil" because it is more understandable what "evil" looks like. If they said "be good", that would raise a lot more questions.

AIconomics in a nutshell: The last hour I sold $120 (I really did!) A day has 24 h. A year has 365 days. $120 * 24h/d * 365d/year = $1.051.200/year That's 1M ARR in one hour!!!

If you’re evaluating local-first, here’s my journey implementing search on that architecture: Postgres, Typesense, Orama, and how I landed on FlexSearch. A tale of frustrated dreams, utopian user experiences and calculated tradeoffs. fika.bar/paoramen/loc...

Twitter/X is so useless for exposure nowadays. My last article (fika.bar/paoramen/ai-...) had more than 10k views in total, from which only 134 came from Twitter. Either you do video, and arguably there are better places to promote video, or you are wasting your time.

The last two decades of the Internet have been an age of abundance. Creators, advertisers, and consumers benefited from a balance of incentives and a mostly open web. Now, with the rise of consumer AI, that balance is breaking. I explore what comes next in my latest essay. fika.bar/paoramen/ai-...

Today I've done something new: I've recorded myself while building a feature. One take, no edits. Watch me build tag suggestions + summarization in one sitting. youtu.be/R17l5j_-itA

Distribution is king. No, most engineers don't use Cursor, but Copilot. The same as most companies run on Teams, not Slack. Never bet against MSFT.

Today I've implemented import/export for bookmarks and feeds at Fika. I was positively impressed that exporting all my ~6k bookmarks worked instantly, when most cloud-based applications take forever (if they implement export at all). Another win for local-first!

Javascript tip: When a `map` returns null values, we often want to filter these values out. Most people use `map` + `filter`, but it's good to remember that you can also use `flatMap` and return `[]` instead of null.

Vibe coding is productive gambling.

One thing I always miss from Rails is the nice SQL logging. I've just built a similar logger for @drizzleORM I've got quite close, except the duration which can't be done since drizzle logs the query before it executes it. gist.github.com/masylum/d081...

I think we don't talk enough that in the terminal you have white... and bright white.

Github is the Detroit of startups

Looking for a job? Or maybe you’ve been inspired by Soham Parekh? Automate job search using n8n and Handinger. The workflow pulls listings from multiple job portals, evaluates how well each offer matches your profile and expectations, and sends a curated daily email. handinger.com/blog/soham-b...

Today I've added a blocklist to Handinger. It’s a classic fun to solve interview problem: You're given a file with 35 million banned domains. What’s the most time- and space-efficient way to check whether a given domain is on the list? How would you do it?

Why did companies settle with discord for support? It's a waste of time for everybody

I wrote a blog post about how to use Handinger to extract information from websites using Google Sheets. Probably the easiest way to do web scraping I've ever seen. From a list of emails, get a screenshot and also a summary from their company website. handinger.com/blog/web-scr...

Building AI agents but hate scraping? Check out the new handinger.com we've just released! Feed it any URL to get summaries, keywords, sentiment analysis, whatever you want to prompt. Without writing a line of code and 20 times cheaper than firecrawl.

If you're not into dinamically typed languages when you're young, you have no heart, and if you're not into statically typed languages when you're old, you have no brain.

I'm introducing more options to Handinger, and I can't offer a flat price anymore. This is going to be the new pricing. What do you think?

Wow, so now Apple will name their operating systems like Fifa games.

Something that no one talks about is how good is OpenAI at scraping. Just drop links from the most protected sites (Linkedin, Zillow, luxury brands...) and they give good results most of the times. The web search API is very expensive though (~$30/1000 pages).

The only ai models for me are the small ones, the ones who are cheap to run, good to follow instructions, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous GPUs exploding like flops across the stars.