Posts on Enrico Mischorr

Building a Voice Assistant From Scratch — What Nobody Tells You About the Decisions That Actually Matter

Wed, 10 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

When I set out to build my own voice assistant, I had a seemingly simple mental model: capture audio, transcribe it, send it to an LLM, speak the response. Four boxes on a whiteboard, a few arrows between them. How hard could it be?

Turns out, the arrows are where all the interesting engineering happens. And the boxes? Each one hides a small universe of trade-offs that only reveal themselves once you start building for real hardware, real latency requirements, and real-world constraints.

How to structure teams

Fri, 12 Apr 2024 00:00:00 +0000

You’ve probably seen it: a reorganization rolls out, someone draws new boxes on a chart, and within months the same coordination problems resurface — just wearing different names. The issue isn’t that the structure was wrong. It’s that nobody asked the right questions before drawing those boxes.

I recently read Team Topologies by Matthew Skelton and Manuel Pais, and it crystallized something I’ve felt across the last years of leading teams and building software: team structure isn’t a template you copy. It’s a design decision — and like all design decisions, it comes with trade-offs.

The problem with Snapshot Testing

Sat, 11 Feb 2023 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve seen it in code reviews. And you probably too. A PR changes a button’s color, and suddenly 47 snapshot tests fail. The author updates them all with --updateSnapshot, the reviewer skims past 200 lines of .snap file changes, and everyone moves on. No one actually verified anything.

This is snapshot testing’s dirty secret: it feels like testing without actually being it.

What Snapshot Tests Actually Assert

I know, most developers probably like snapshot testing. It’s easy. And it takes away all the effort to write tests. But if that’s what you’re looking for you could just as well skip tests as a whole and “safe” yourself the work.

How to Find Good People to Hire (Without Competing on LinkedIn)

Sat, 21 Aug 2021 00:00:00 +0000

LinkedIn is a crowded battlefield. If you’re not a well-known name or don’t have recruiter budgets to burn, your job posting is competing against thousands of others — and losing. The good news? Some of the best candidates aren’t actively job hunting on platforms at all. They’re learning, building, and showing up in places most companies overlook.

Here’s where to find them.

Universities: Get There Before Everyone Else

The most obvious advantage of university recruiting is access to talent before the market gets to them. But the less obvious advantage is even better: students are often more adaptable, curious, and willing to grow into a role than someone who’s been doing the same job for five years. As an added bonus, they often bring in new ideas and tech-stacks your older colleagues are not aware of.

Becoming a Team Lead can be harder than being one

Sun, 25 Oct 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Nobody would have thought that the hardest part of becoming a team lead wasn’t the leading — it was the becoming.

When I made the switch from senior engineer to team lead, I somehow expected a clean break. Old role ends on Friday, new role starts on Monday. In hindsight that was naive. In reality, the transition stretched over months. And during that time, I was stuck in a no man’s land that was more exhausting than the team lead role itself.

How You Know You're Doing Scrum Wrong

Thu, 05 Mar 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Here’s the truth about Scrum: if you’re following it to the letter, you’re probably doing it wrong.

I’ve seen teams treat the Scrum Guide like holy scripture — rigidly executing every ceremony, obsessing over story point accuracy, and monitor process compliance. Meanwhile, they ship late, burn out, and wonder why this “agile” thing doesn’t feel very agile.

The problem isn’t Scrum itself. It’s confusing the practices with the principles.

The “One Size Fits All” Trap

Scrum was designed as a framework, not a rulebook. Yet many teams adopt it as a fixed template: two-week sprints, daily standups at 9:15, retros on Friday, refinement on Monday. Copy-paste from a random team that posted about it on the internet.