I’m Renato Guerra Cavalcanti, an independent software architect and consultant. I’ve been writing software since 1999, and from the start I’ve paid attention to how software is designed, not just whether it runs. My work centers on distributed systems, Event Sourcing, CQRS, and Domain-Driven Design, and on the engineering practices that keep a codebase healthy: clean code, clear boundaries, and design that speaks for itself. I’ve built systems with Akka since 2013 and have contributed to it since 2017, first on the core libraries and most recently on the Akka Runtime and the Akka SDK. A Scala developer since 2009, I founded BeScala, the Belgian Scala User Group, and I speak regularly at Scala, Java, and broader developer conferences.
Octo Cogito is the banner I think and work under. Whether on a team or alongside one, what I care about is helping people reason about the trade-offs underneath their code and stay in the driver’s seat as their software grows, especially now that AI can write the code but not make the judgment calls.
This site is where I publish my talks, write about engineering and the craft behind it, and share what I’m learning.
A word on the name. ‘Octo’ comes from my GitHub handle, @octonato, a blend of GitHub’s octocat and my own name. ‘Cogito’ reaches back further, to my studies in philosophy and psychology, and to NeoCogito, the company in Paris where I started out as a developer. Put together, the name says what I care about: thinking before building. It is where I began, and how I think and work.