Bolovsky
Ricardo Lopes
I lead engineering by day and write Go at night. This is where both end up.
I am Director of Engineering at Doutor Finanças, in Lisbon. Before that I was CTO of a payment institution, and before that a lead engineer in Berlin. Most of what I do now is the unglamorous half of the job: deciding what not to build, keeping the systems people depend on boring, and giving a team room to do good work.
Away from that I build Caravel — a turn-based 4X game of discovery, trade and independence, written from the simulation up. It is the long project: one focused round at a time, each one ending green.
Work
What I'm building
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Caravel
A turn-based 4X strategy game in the spirit of Colonization (1994), built on a pure deterministic simulation in Go. Five nations, five languages, desktop and Android.
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Doutor Finanças
Engineering and interoperability across the products and the platform — architecture, delivery, and the people doing the work.
How
How I like to work
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Small, bisectable rounds
One theme per round, an explicit out-of-scope list, one commit. If something breaks, the change that broke it is one commit away.
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Check before building
Survey the code first and let the findings shape the design. If the premise turns out to be false, stop and say so rather than improvise.
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Determinism over cleverness
Integer maths, one seeded source of randomness, a single apply path. Systems you can reproduce exactly are systems you can actually debug.