Books I read in 2024
I read 30 books or 8365 pages in 2024, a solid improvement over last year’s, and many of those books were excellent. Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov was...
On C# and .NET quick release cycle
I sat to jot down a quick introduction to my C# 13 What’s New and Interesting session at the upcoming .NET Conference Italia 2024 next week, and what I ended...
Speaking at the .NET Conference Italia 2024
I’m speaking at the .NET Conference Italia 2024 on Dec 16th in Milan at the Microsoft House. My session is titled C# 13 What’s New and Interesting and will...
Kuma Fo by Les Amazones D'Afrique
Inspired by the historic Dahomey Amazons and founded by three of the biggest powerhouses in African music, Mamani Keïta, Mariam Doumbia, and Oumou Sangare,...
Reading books and commenting on them with ChatGPT
I just finished reading Paul Auster’s The New York Trilogy 1 . On this occasion, I discovered a new use for ChatGPT and LLMs. ChatGPT and I chatted about the...
From Corniolo to Passo Braccina via Valpisella
I took a daily hike in my beloved Apennine Mountains a few weeks ago. One of my favourite motorcycling routes is the narrow, engaging, panoramic road that...
A walk after the storm
A walk on the beach right after the storm. Lots of logs scattered all around, for miles. And sanderlings running all over the place. The post A walk after...
Journalists should not surrender their weapons
Kara Swisher, a dean in digital and classical journalism, has an interesting article in the New York Magazine. As a witness and protagonist she recounts how...
Eve 2.2.0
Today I released Eve 2.2 . It is a maintenance release that drops old Pythons and adds support for the latest versions of the language. Long overdue, it also...
Gimme gimme gimme
Why does man print “gimme gimme gimme” at 00:30? The maintainer of man is a good friend of mine, and one day six years ago I jokingly said to him that if you...
Fattura Elettronica v3.5
I just released FatturaElettronica .NET v3.5.0 . This version adds multi-language support, all thanks to the excellent work done by Michael Mairegger . We...
I am Herman Melville
I never knew about the connection between Ray Bradbury, John Huston, and Heman Melville. Today, few people are aware that Bradbury, renowned science fiction...
Books are strange objects
Dave Rupert, on why he likes books: Books are strange objects. Chapters and chapters of coherent research and lived experiences assembled by people who...
Under ASP.NET 8, NGINX returns 502 Bad Gateway after authentication by IdentityServer
Today, I learned the hard way that NGINX has small buffer sizes, which can cause trouble in specific scenarios like mine. We have two ASP.NET 8 applications...
The loneliness of the low ranking tennis player
I admit, like many of my compatriots in this last year and a half, I follow a lot more tennis than usual, and it is all the fault (or merit) of Jannick...
Why Github actually won
In the end we won because the open source community started to converge on distributed version control and we were the only ones in the hosting space that...
Solar will get unfathomably cheap
At home, we haven’t done anything about it yet: we’re still 100% grid-dependant and old-fashioned, partly because it would be problematic for us as we live...
Capability makes you life simpler
Quoting Bryan Baun : Capability makes your life simpler. Tolerance, skills, knowledge, and health are always with you, wherever you go. They are assets but...
The secret inside One Million Checkboxes
A few days into making One Million Checkboxes I thought I’d been hacked. What was that doing in my database? A few hours later I was tearing up, proud of...
Infocom: The Documentary
For nerds of my generation, Infocom is a legend. Today, I watched the long-time overdue Infocom: The Documentary and I found it to be a gem. raw HTML omitted...
I'm leaving Twitter/X
I’m abandoning Twitter/X. I’ll freeze the account without deleting it; never say never, but I don’t plan on coming back. I no longer feel comfortable on that...
The crazy engineering of Venice
We spent a weekend in Venice 1 a short while ago, and one of the things that caught my attention was the wells in the city’s squares. Is there fresh water...
Capability makes you like simpler
Quoting Bryan Baun : Capability makes your life simpler. Tolerance, skills, knowledge, and health are always with you, wherever you go. They are assets but...
Digital market is going back to 20th century
Rand Fishkin on the evolution of digital marketing: Well, marketing friends, we gotta have a serious talk. Because the way we’ve done marketing for the last...
A Solarpunk Manifesto
I dig the attempt at a Solarpunk Manifesto . Solarpunk is a movement in speculative fiction, art, fashion, and activism that seeks to answer and embody the...
The tour of Mount Civetta in the Dolomites
I left home at 5 AM on my Triumph Bonneville, arrived in Palafavera at about 9 AM, and left on foot half an hour later. I was eager to see the Civetta’s...
David Foster Wallace on screen time
Cause the technology is just gonna get better and better and it’s gonna get easier and easier and more and more convenient and more and more pleasurable to...
ShellCheck
Today I learned about ShellCheck , a static analysis tool for shell scripts that “finds bugs in your scripts”. It can and should be run on the command line,...
Bash-Oneliner: a collection of terminal tricks for Linux
Bash-Oneliner is an excellent resource for Bash/Linux users. Most of the “tricks” are well-known, but there is always something to learn. More importantly,...
A guide to Miyazaki weird little guys
With so many weird little guys running around Miyazaki’s filmography, it seems time to honor and celebrate them. […] A key aspect of Miyazaki’s weird little...
The art of not reading
The art of not reading is a very important one. It consists in not taking an interest in whatever may be engaging the attention of the general public at any...
The main issue with social media
The main issue with social media is that we want them to be everything. We want them to be a place for casual interactions, for discovery, for news, for...
Microsoft MVP
Last night, I was at an outdoor theatre with Serena, watching Anatomy of a Fall (an excellent film). Outdoor theatres are becoming rare, which is a pity, and...
A library is a good place
I’ve always loved libraries. They are a glimpse of the kind of ‘better world’ we all want to live in. That’s because by their very nature they are inclusive...
Write a lot
Write a lot. This is alpha and omega of writing advice, the beginning and the end, and it’s that way for a reason– I don’t know anyone who’s good writing who...
Quoting J.P. Wing
When I’m out hiking on my weekend hike I often spend much of the experience in contemplation. My thoughts are usually tickling at Warp 10, going everywhere...
The exponential growth of solar power will change the world
The latest issue of The Economist focuses on solar energy. The introductory article is short, compelling, and optimistic. On the economics, they make a good...
Quoting Roger Federer
When you’re playing a point, it is the most important thing in the world. But when it’s behind you, it’s behind you… This mindset is really crucial, because...
The appropriate response to a horrible idea is a better idea
The post The appropriate response to a horrible idea is a better idea appeared first on nicolaiarocci.com.
Generative AI is not going to build your engineering team for you
Charity Majors1 has a good, long-form article on the Stack Overflow blog. The title is misleading as, while AI’s impact on software engineering and its...
Experts vs. imitators
I love this concise checklist on detecting fake experts, with which my experience wholeheartedly agrees. The first one: Imitators can’t answer questions at a...
Container security meetup at DevRomagna
We’re doing a DevRomagna meetup on container security. It will happen on June 26 at 19pm, it will be in Italian, and the speaker will be the one and the only...
Hidden Tracks: Domodossola – Weissmies
Lately, I have become increasingly interested in sound. Of the short films I shoot while hiking, for example, I’ve noticed that I’m primarily interested in...
Quoting Sean Voisen
just writing down notes is all that really matters. Any tool that allows you to compose and save text will do. It is the act of writing, not the act of...
The Toschi Hermitage
I went on a motorcycle and hiking trip yesterday. It was a glorious day, albeit windy, which helped keep the temperature chill. Mixing hiking with...
How to handle custom claims in an Open ID Connect-authenticated ASP.NET Core app
Today, I learned how to handle custom claims in an Open ID Connect authenticated ASP.NET Core app. The scenario goes like this. I have an ASP.NET Core app...
Kagi is profitable
Two years after its launch, Kagi, the pay-per-use search engine is profitable. We are also thrilled to report that we have achieved profitability. This...
LLMs don't remember everything you say
Simon Willison has a new article explaining an important and often ununderstood aspect of LLMs. There’s a remarkable difference between chatting with an LLM,...
Quoting Elena Kostyuchenko
In 2021, in Russian courts, the fate of 783000 people was decided. There were 2190 acquittals. Two thousand one hundred and ninety. The probability of being...
Fattura Elettronica for .NET v3.4.15
Today I released Fattura Elettronica for .NET v3.4.15. The Fattura Elettronica project allows for the validation and de/serialization of electronic invoices...