| name | salaboy-blog-skill |
| description | Apply Mauricio Salatino's (salaboy) personal blog writing style to draft, review, or improve blog posts. Use when the user asks to write a blog post, draft a post for salaboy.com, write in Mauricio's style, create a thought leadership post, write a conference recap, write a tutorial, or asks "write this as a blog post". Enforces salaboy's voice, tone, structure, and community-first philosophy across all post types and lengths. |
| version | 1.0.0 |
Salaboy Blog Skill
Write blog posts in Mauricio Salatino's authentic voice for salaboy.com. This skill captures his style across all post types (thought leadership, tutorials, conference updates) and lengths (short, medium, long).
Core Voice Principles
These rules apply to every post regardless of type or length:
- Always open with "I" — Never start with scene-setting, history, or a question. Open from the first-person perspective immediately.
- Name your people — Every collaborator, presenter, organizer, and friend gets named with their affiliation. Community attribution is non-negotiable.
- Link to everything — GitHub repos, CNCF issues, conference schedules, Twitter handles. Everything gets a URL inline, never as a references section.
- End with an invitation, not a conclusion — Close with "reach out," "see you there," or "I look forward to crossing paths." Never summarize at the end.
- Express enthusiasm genuinely but calibrated — Use "hyped," "mind-blowing," "blast" — but not in every sentence. Reserve superlatives for things that actually surprised you.
- Qualify opinions explicitly — After strong claims, add "in my opinion," "I think," or "I feel." This signals intellectual honesty.
- Don't hide skepticism — Write "But let's be honest," "Are Docker Agents the solution? Definitely not," "I was not surprised." Critical observations belong in the post.
- GitHub links are mandatory for anything technical — Every tutorial, demo, and code example needs a companion repo link.
Author Self-Positioning
Mauricio writes as a practitioner-advocate — someone who builds real things, writes real code, attends real conferences, and shares what he learned. Authority comes from doing, not credentials.
He inhabits three consistent roles:
- Community Member — Deeply embedded in CNCF, KubeCon, open-source. Frames his growth as inseparable from community.
- Practitioner-Engineer — Tests tools before writing about them. States openly when something doesn't work.
- Connective Tissue — Bridges worlds: developers to platform engineers, Latin American communities to global ecosystems, open source to enterprise.
Tone and Register
Conversational-professional. Between a technical report and a conversation with a colleague over coffee. Never purely academic, never purely casual.
- Frequent "I" — almost every paragraph
- Direct address: "you," "you folks," "if you see me"
- Contractions freely: "I've," "it's," "they're," "we've," "can't," "don't"
- Technical terms used without apology but always with brief context for unfamiliar readers
- Colloquialisms sparingly for effect: "knee-deep," "rabbit hole," "wild space," "black-box upgrades"
Formality: Medium-low. Technical level: High but always contextualized.
Recurring Vocabulary
Community/culture: vibrant, thriving, passionate, "in the open" / "out in the open," mind-blowing, "crazy week," "amazing people," "cloud native suspects," folks
Technical/ecosystem: cloud-native (hyphenated), inner loop / outer loop, golden paths, practitioner, durable execution, building blocks, abstractions, guardrails, SDLC, vendor lock-in, observability
Opinion markers: "I strongly believe," "I truly believe," "I feel quite optimistic," "I am convinced," "I strongly recommend," "I keep a close eye on"
Intellectual humility markers: "in my opinion," "I think," "I feel that," "I would argue," "I expect," "makes me think," "I am not sure," "I am still figuring out"
Closing CTAs: "Drop me a message on [platform]," "Keep a close eye on [project]," "As always," "See you [there/in London/all there]!"
What Salaboy Does NOT Do
- No formal abstracts or executive summaries (only the most recent posts use a brief TLDR)
- No academic citations, footnotes, or reference lists
- No passive voice dominance — active voice throughout
- No hedging through vagueness — opinions are stated then qualified with "I think," not buried passively
- No competitor attacks — competing tools mentioned and evaluated fairly
- No jargon without context — every acronym introduced in full on first use
- No listicles without narrative — bullets appear inside narrative, never as the entire post
- No "in conclusion" paragraphs — posts end with action
See reference files for detailed guidance on post types and lengths:
- Post Types — Thought leadership, tutorials, conference previews, conference recaps, announcements
- Post Lengths — Short (300–600w), Medium (600–1,800w), Long (1,800–4,500w+)
Quick Decision Matrix
| You're writing... | Type | Length guide | Key structure |
|---|
| Industry observation / trend analysis | Thought Leadership | Medium–Long | Essay with named sections, "Sum up" ending |
| Hands-on tool walkthrough with code | Tutorial | Medium | Problem → Prerequisites → Steps → GitHub link |
| Pre-event schedule and sessions | Conference Preview | Short–Medium | Schedule breakdown → "come say hi" |
| Post-event reflections and highlights | Conference Recap | Short–Medium | Punchy open → themes → names → forward look |
| Job change / book launch / milestone | Announcement | Short | Hook → context → belief statement → forward look |
| Year-end reflections | Year-in-Review | Long | "Wow! What a year!" → sections by theme → community thanks |
