What .NET 10 garbage collection changes really mean for developers
“For decades, garbage collection in .NET was a background concern. It was mostly invisible to the everyday developer and was regarded as ‘automatic’ unless...
The Marmarole Mountains: a three-day solo hike in the Dolomites
The Marmarole mountain group is an island of quiet, where, especially at the end of the season, it’s easy not to meet anyone for entire days. Nature is harsh...
Ur-Fascism
Prompted by an old post by Bob Schwartz (2017), I revisited and reread Ur-Fascism, the essay Umberto Eco wrote in 1995 for the New York Review of Books. What...
The Monte Mauro loop
On Sunday afternoon, I suddenly decided to take my motorcycle, ride to the foothills, leave the bike there, and hike the Monte Mauro loop, including the...
Age and cognitive ability
Finally some good news for us old farts! Cognitive ability (probably) peaks between 50 and 60. The post Age and cognitive ability appeared first on...
Why exercise is a miracle drug
Last year, Ashley and a large team of scientists conducted an elaborate experiment on the effects of exercise on the mammalian body. In one test, Ashley put...
Empty nest
A few weeks ago, we accompanied Anna to Amsterdam, where she will study at the University. She is our youngest daughter. Marco left home years ago to study...
Cognitive load is what matters
Sometimes we feel confusion going through the code. Confusion costs time and money. Confusion is caused by high cognitive load. It’s not some fancy abstract...
Why arent people going to conferences anymore?
Brent Ozar’s article below resonates with my post-COVID experience as a conference speaker. From big national and international conferences to local meetups...
Python: The Documentary
This is the story of the world’s most beloved programming language: Python. What began as a side project in Amsterdam during the 1990s became the software...
The first-line treatment for ADHD
The first-line treatment for ADHD is stimulants. Everything else in this post works best as a complement to, rather than as an alternative to, stimulant...
Invoicetronic, or what I've been working on recently
The most recent project I worked on is Invoicetronic, a modern API for complete management of the electronic invoicing cycle in Italy (FatturaPA/SDI). We had...
A zoomable, searchable archive of BYTE Magazine
From roughly the late 80s until the mid-90s, every month I would visit the newsstand at my city’s train station, hoping to snag the single copy of BYTE...
The ROI of exercise
Like Herman below, I exercise daily. A one-hour brisk walk in the early morning on weekdays before sitting at the desk, and four weekly sessions of...
Repair, the skill nobody talks about
Let me tell you something that will happen after you become a manager: you’re going to mess up. A lot. You’ll give feedback that lands wrong and crushes...
Old timers who built the early web are coding with AI like it's 1995
The old timers who built the early web are coding with AI like it’s 1995. Think about it: They gave blockchain the sniff test and walked away. Ignored crypto...
Oops he slipped
I was hiking the Narrows trail along the Rockcastle river in Kentucky’s Daniel Boone National Forest, slipped off the edge of the trail and broke me ankle....
The lies we tell ourselves
The lies we tell others are for survival. But the lies we tell ourselves… those can kill us! A quote from Ragazzo by Zuzu, which I read recently. The post...
Professional decline begins sooner than expected
Luci Gutiérrez, from the linked article. Arthur C. Brooks, in his July 2019 Atlantic article Your Professional Decline Is Coming (Much) Sooner Than You...
Tech promised everything. Did it deliver?
I have had the good fortune of meeting Scott several times at various conferences and the MVP Summits held at Microsoft headquarters in Seattle. Seeing him...
Just one good thing
In the last year, a mindset shift and approach appeared as a very simple idea: just do one thing, that I want to do today. The one thing can be small or big,...
Foothills of Romagna
Between motorcycle rides with my friends from TOMCC Italia and family dinners at sunset, I spent most of the weekend in the foothills of Romagna. I’m...
Neuromancer in 2025
Neuromancer has become more than just an influential novel; it’s now the blueprint for the entire Cyberpunk genre. Even if you’ve never read it, you’ve felt...
What doesn't change
Everyone’s either panicking that AI will replace them or assuming they don’t need to learn anything anymore. Both miss the point entirely. AI amplifies what...
Maintaining curiosity
I believe what’s important isn’t the specific technology itself, but rather maintaining curiosity that always looks toward new alternatives and making...
I'm speaking at DevMarche Summer AI Afternoon
On Thursday, I will be conducting an MCP Server session at the Summer AI Afternoon event organized by DevMarche in collaboration with DevRomagna, the...
Cloudflare to introduce pay-per-crawl for AI bots
The biggest news in tech this week (which isn’t over yet) is, without a doubt, that Cloudflare is about to introduce a pay-per-crawl model for AI bots—huge...
Sometimes bad weather can feel like a gift
Simon Collison in Another Week in Edale perfectly captures why I enjoy hiking in bad weather, something those in my proximity consider borderline reckless: A...
How software became a lifestyle brand
Omer has an intriguing essay up on his blog: choosing software used to be straightforward. does the app do what you need, or not? but now, opening notion or...
Working on databases from prison
Preston Thorpe: I’m very excited to announce that I have recently joined Turso as a software engineer. For many in the field, including myself, getting to...
The Cure's Acoustic Hits
In 2001, The Cure released Greatest Hits, the compilation with which they ended their contract with Fiction Records. The first edition of the anthology was...
I canceled my Bluesky account
I deleted my Bluesky account. I didn’t follow anyone anyway, and I only used it to repost content from my website. Being almost mainstream now, I found...
Quoting Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
The best moments in our lives are not the passive, receptive, relaxing times… The best moments usually occur if a person’s body or mind is stretched to its...
AI coding is less fun
I’ve been doing “agentic coding” for some time, and well, it’s weird. On stable, mature technology (in my case, the C#/.NET stack), it is beneficial, as it...
If a note can be public, it should be
Quoting Dries Buytaert: A few years ago, I quietly adopted a small principle that has changed how I think about publishing on my website. […] The principle...
MCP Remote
I’ve been implementing a remote MCP Server. It comes with a hybrid authentication system that supports the OAuth2 flow and, as a backup, a custom header for...
Free online courses from top universities
An impressive list of free online courses from top universities, courtesy of Open Culture. I’m bookmarking them for a friend when he retires. The post Free...
Marp, the markdown presentation ecosystem
Today, I learned about Marp, the “Markdown Presentation Ecosystem,” which comes with an enticing promise: to create beautiful slide decks using an intuitive...
Fattura Elettronica v4
I just released FatturaElettronica.NET v4. The major version bump is due to a minor breaking change introduced with this version. After removing the...
In bloom
After years of care, the orchid in the bathroom has bloomed again. I moved it from the edge of the bathtub, where it had been surviving in a wilted state for...
Blogs are still a thing
Quoting Andreas: Blogging is a small niche these days. There isn’t much hype around it, nor is there any money to be made because the VC firms are all busy...
Protests work
Quoting Brent Simmons: Chatting with my friends about how I hate these fascist assholes doesn’t do a damn thing. Protests work. (Imperfectly, sure, with no...
The empire strikes back
Quoting straight from Jim Nielsen’s note on LLM training on copyrighted data: As a broke teenager, the web was this strange wonderland where you could access...
Exploration by Calibro 35
Calibro 35’s Exploration, their latest album that I have just purchased, supremely fits and redefines the instrumental jazz-funk genre, adding a firm pinch...
Agentic coding recommendations
Armin Ronacher is on a roll. He just published his Agentic Coding Reccomendations. On the topic of Agenting Coding he recently published: AI Changes...
MCP or connecting our apps to LLMs
Last night, I presented a session titled MCP or Connecting our Apps to LLMs at DevRomagna, our local developer’s community, and I think it went well. I had...
Quoting Sam Altman
In the 2030s, intelligence and energy—ideas, and the ability to make ideas happen—are going to become wildly abundant. These two have been the fundamental...
People won't use IDEs anymore
I’m just back from watching Mastering Claude Code in 30 Minutes, a talk by Boris Cherny, who, I learned, created Claude Code. I was struck by Boris’s reply...
What happens when people don't understand how AI works
This week’s obligatory yet solid warning about the misunderstanding of LLMs comes from Tyler Austin Harper’s What Happens When People Don’t Understand How AI...
Why Bell Labs worked
Why Bell Labs Worked is a fascinating, evocative read. We live in a metrics obsessed culture that is obsessed with narrowly defined productivity. There’s too...