I'm currently the Head of Engineering at Filestage.io. I'm a technology leader and Computer Science Engineer with over 17 years of hands-on experience, consistently coding while guiding software development in startup environments. Passionate about building high-performing teams and leveraging technology to delight customers.
If you want to know more about my work check out my full resume and side projects. If you want to get in touch, me@eliocapella.com.
I invite you to read my latest blog posts:
After 18 years of writing code by hand every day, I stopped almost overnight. Our team is shipping more without an increase in bug reports. But the part that excites me most is what programming could become next.
When Filestage engineering grew from 6 to 22 people, coordinating everyone as one team would not scale. We mapped the product domains, assigned clear squad ownership, grew managers from within, and built the technical foundations for teams to ship independently. We scaled ownership, not coordination...
There is no inspiring way to tell people they are losing their jobs. But when you have to communicate bad news, you can still do it with honesty, clarity, and respect. Share the business reality, support the people leaving, reduce scope for the team that remains, and rebuild trust with facts, not false reassurance...
A single shared queue can look efficient while one large upload batch makes everyone else wait. Here is how we moved background file processing toward fair per-user scheduling, kept throughput high, and stopped noisy uploads from turning into user complaints. Fairness was the scalability fix...
AI slop is code that is hard to trust, hard to change, and hard to recover. Keep it under control with guardrails for readability, reliability, performance, shipping, and observability. The bottleneck is no longer typing, it is judgment and taste...
Write tests that let you refactor and deploy with confidence. Test behaviors not functions, mock only at system edges, use in-memory databases, and record HTTP fixtures. If your tests break every time you rename a function, you're testing structure, not behavior...
How we shipped AI-powered text and image review in under a month with sub-30-second processing. Trade-offs that worked: AWS Textract, DINOv2, CPU inference, and MongoDB vector search. No custom models, no GPUs, no new infrastructure...
Enterprise customers demand complex permissions, but naive implementations that query on every request will break at scale. Learn how to shift from read-time queries to write-time pre-computation for fast reads, with working SQL examples and an interactive demo...
How I used AI to migrate 970 test files with 6000+ test cases from React Testing Library v13 to v14 in just one week. What would have taken months manually was accomplished through 50 PRs with the help of Claude Code, codemods, and iterative prompt engineering. The future of software maintenance is here...
I started my programming career with Java and eventually discovered Rich Hickey's Simple Made Easy philosophy. Today I share how to apply these principles to JavaScript: values over objects, data over syntax, and controlled state management. Simple doesn't mean familiar, simple means untangled...
Great engineering culture reduces time-to-value while protecting users and engineers. I find that leading by example is the best way to get your points across. From kindness and pragmatism to full-cycle ownership and fighting complexity, here's how I build teams that deliver...
At Filestage we've always heavily relied on third parties to build our product, we don't want to waste our time managing our database we want to fix our customer problems and focus on that. I'm very thankful to be able to build on the shoulders of giants, but I painfully came to learn that not all vendors are at the same level...
Before we started our open trial at Filestage I wouldn't have imagined the amount of effort it would take us to fight spammers and other misuse of the platform. We aren't a big brand but still hundreds of bad actors show up in our trial, the internet is wild...
You can measure RAM and CPU usage or the latency of the database per query to find bottlenecks in your code, but how do you identify your team's performance issues? Five years ago I started tracking metrics for my team's performance at Filestage...