All posts

  • 🇮🇹 Una settimana a New York

    – Dopo una visita di una settimana nella città che non dorme mai, ho raccolto qui qualche indicazione, qualche riflessione, qualche sciocchezza.

  • A week in New York

    – After a week-long visit to the city that never sleeps, I've gathered some tips, reflections, and nonsense to share.

  • Passwords and Math

    – Let's take a moment to talk about password security, starting with a somewhat absurd example to clear up an issue that has constantly bothered me.

  • The mythical Future You

    – You should focus on making things good enough from the start, rather than relying on a mythical "Future You" to fix issues down the road.

  • A few thoughts about Github Copilot

    – I have used Copilot daily for three months now, mostly writing TypeScript, React and nodejs code. I think I have quite clear in mind its use cases and the reasons why I don't want to go back to not using it.

  • Something funny about self-closing tags

    – Do you know the reason why we are so accustomed to writing self-closing tags as <Something /> and not <Something/>, with the space in between? Is it just a style preference or is there something more? Well, it's an interesting story…

  • Visiting Zakynthos in June

    – After having enjoyed a full week on the beautiful Zakynthos island, let me share with you some tips and ideas for your next trip to the island.

  • Visiting Gran Canaria in January

    – After having spent a full week on the Gran Canaria island, I want to share some of my impressions so to give some ideas to future visitors and of course as a journal for the future self.

  • 🇮🇹 I miei primi dieci anni a Berlino

    – No, non inizierò dicendo che "pare ieri" perché non lo pare affatto. Anzi, pare passata proprio una vita intera e sinceramente credo che questa allegoria si possa estendere ad un suo significato ancora più profondo.

  • Effective product development with small engineering teams

    – Small engineering teams working in a startup usually have the luxury to be allowed to try several approaches and ideas toward their main goals, when it comes to product development optimizations: _leverage integrations, worship simplicity _and maintain _cost-effectiveness.

  • Cycling the Berlin-Usedom route

    – I just came back from a week on the bike: this time I took the way to the Baltic Sea, pedalling for about 310km in 4 days. I did this trip at the end of August.

  • Things I wish I knew when I started drawing

    – My own definition of “drawing seriously” is more or less the same that applies to “running seriously”; you get to that status when you look forward to the next moment you’ll be only with yourself and your paper and pens, or your running shoes. It’s that feeling you get at the end of your new drawing, when you breath that sensation in: you have accomplished something, and you actually like what you did, as much as you were happy and proud when you broke your PB running 10k.

  • A short guide to the WebSummit in Lisbon

    – This one has been my second year in Lisbon, attending the glaring WebSummit. There are a few things that I consider worth saving for myself or others in preparation for the next year.

  • Driving the Mercedes C200 — for dummies

    – During our recent trip to France I had the pleasure to drive a rented car of a class I have never driven before: a new Mercedes C200 convertible. Being the geek I am, I played with it and all its perks until the very last minute of the last day of rent. We spent 9 days with it, making 2100 km in total.

  • Visiting Crete in March (with a motorbike)

    – I just came back from a relatively short vacation–a week – in Crete and I would like to share some of my impressions of that experience with you, fellow travelers.

  • How to use Google Spreadsheet for your cryptocurrencies portfolio overview

    – Over the past few months, I got involved in the world of cryptocurrencies and I played a bit trading some of them. After a few days, it was more than clear that I needed a simple and effective way to keep an eye on the crazy by-the-hours ups and downs of the markets and get a sense of the performances of my small portfolio.

  • How to write a Visual Studio Code color theme from scratch

    – I hope you agree with me when I say that Visual Studio Code (from here on just VSC) is today’s best text editor. The feature set is growing over a nice monthly based release cycle, the customization options cover almost everything you’d need and the integration with Git is top-notch. It even has an integrated terminal! 😇

  • The tale of a seasoned developer — Part II

    – The end of the century was without doubt (surprise!) a big event. For my personal career and professional development, it meant moving from a quite comfortable permanent work position to something different, something more challenging.

  • My Whole30 Program

    – I guess this is the mandatory blog post at the end of my (first) Whole30 Program. When I started the program, exactly one month ago, I was looking forward to write about it: if anything, it would have meant for me the end of the challenge and with it a reasonable amount of that subtle pleasure you get when you accomplish something relatively important.

  • The tale of a seasoned developer — Part I

    – I received my first salary in the “software industry” as a software developer at the beginning of April 1988, which was 30-something years ago. I guess it might be interesting–at least just for myself–to go through some of these years and see what I’ve done and what I’ve learned.

  • You’re not a lead developer

    – There has been quite an interesting discussion blossomed from a recent article about the Senior Developer role and what it really means. I basically agree with everything Mark says, but I’d like to go even a bit further down the road of defining what is what in the software industry. At least, for the part I am familiar with.

  • Hints and tips you need to know before starting to write a simple Chrome Extension

    – Have you ever wanted to stop an animated GIF? Like, when you are reading an article and the author has embedded some of those things into it which keep flashing and looping when you’re trying to concentrate on the text? It happens to me and it happens quite a lot recently which means that I had to do something about it, specifically a Chrome Extension.

  • How to download large files from Github

    – I recently came to find a limitation on the otherwise amazing Github API. My goal was to download a big file (specifically, a tar.gz) from a private repository, using the command line, via a bash script that is. As it turned out, this task has been much more difficult that I initially thought.

  • «Questo è l’ultimo viaggio»

    – Sono a Regensburg e il treno che mi deve portare a Hof è in ritardo di dieci minuti e quei dieci minuti potrebbero essere un problema, visto che a Hof avrò solo nove minuti per prendere la coincidenza successiva.