About
Ismael Tavares Rodino
Senior Software Engineer
I’m a senior software engineer in Porto Alegre, Brazil, with more than five years building production systems across frontend, backend, cloud and AI. I’ve worked with teams in the US, Norway and Brazil, and I’ve shipped products where there was nobody else to hand the hard part to.
These days I split my time between Gudi, a cultural event marketplace I founded and built end to end, and WishApply, an AI career assistant that applies to jobs on the candidate’s behalf. Both taught me more about architecture than any course did, mostly by being wrong first.
Why this blog exists
Most engineering writing describes what was built. The interesting part is almost always the decision underneath: why an automaton instead of an agent, why permissions live in the database instead of the client, why the cheap model plans and the expensive one writes. Those decisions have costs you can measure, and I try to bring the measurements along.
So the rule here is simple: nothing gets published unless I can point at the code, the benchmark, or the incident behind it. If a post claims a number, that number came from somewhere I can show you.
What I’m going deep on
- Software architecture — boundaries, trade-off analysis, and knowing which decisions are expensive to reverse.
- AWS and cloud — moving past managed-platform defaults to owning the infrastructure, its observability and its cost.
- AI engineering — retrieval only where it compresses, agents only where a verifier gives them a stopping rule, cost measured against benchmarks instead of guessed at.