Miscellaneous

Preamble Recently I became nostalgic and fascinated with stuff from the past, so I decided to create a Vagrantfile to work with FreeBSD1. Why FreeBSD? Because as a developer, I really like Docker and I started looking in the past to find its historical birth: in fact, as a concept, Docker is no so recent as you think, and I think it exists also because of the works of some other bigs from 80’, such as Poul-Henning Kamp2. Starting from its work and using a FreeBSD installation I did some experiments with jails, to understand better what they really are, how they works - how can you create what it will look like a vintage container - and why you should use them in a FreeBSD environment - at least, to learn something new. ...

Intro Mute post Bye

Intro As you might know, I use to work with AWS doing and destroying stuff like many other devopssss out there: this post is all about some challenges and problems I had to deal recently - in the last months - and involves some notes about how to deal with multistage environments, decoupling and many other practices you should all know about. The first thing to emphasize is that each of these best practices is fairly clear and well-defined, for sure online (perhaps discussed by bloggers more experienced than me XD) and deeply described in many books. The problem - at least, in my experience - is not about understanding these best practices, sharing them within a team and starting to use them as a group. The huge problem is actually the one of verifying and scaffold a behavioral pattern to put them in place, by definition of standards within a context that did not use them previously. ...

Intro In the last 50 days I had to work a lot for many… many different reasons. The main ones: I was accepted as a Speaker at FullStackConf19 in Turin, talking about coding in mobility. You can find the slide of my speech here and the material I prepared the talk in this Github repo. By the way, I was truly inspired by some of the talks during the conference, and I started brainstorming around the next post; I moved back to Italy and trust me -> it was a pretty complex goal to achieve, with particular regards to my car; I joined Enerbrain and I’m really having fun with theme building smart-energy solution as a Devops Engineer; I joined a softball team - yes, it’s mixed, but it’s officially played also by men hahe. Let me say that it’s not the usual kind of team, it’s more a sort of “group of old friends playing drinking and…” overall having fun together; What else… oh yes, I migrated my blog to Hugo and I also migrated my release pipeline to Gitlab. ...

Prelude In the last two months, many things happened in my life, so this is the reason I wasn’t able to dedicate a lot of time to my blog. What can I say… I’ve been in South Africa, and I literally lived experiences I will never forget and cannot be described. I visited the Blyde Canyon and the Rain Forest. I made so many safaris, I saw the elephants in the morning washing and drinking from the river, the giraffes, I saw the warthogs - and by the way, they are exactly as Pumba in the Lion King by Disney - the lion, which was about to attack the buffalos, I found the white rhinos, the hyenas and the leopards. I ate in places with monkeys literally running free, I slept in a lodge - which was more similar to a castle than a lodge, and so much more comfortable than my apartment - and I had showers with an astonishing view on the savannah and nothing else. I visited Cape Town and I bought a beautifully engraved ostrich egg, I took a boat for the island of the seals. I made pictures of so many panoramic points on the coast, and I saw one breeding of ostriches. I reached the tip of Good Hope with the funicular up to the lighthouse, and I saw where the Atlantic Ocean and the Indian Ocean meet. I saw the South Africans penguins, I stopped inside False Bay and after that, I visited the botanical garden, with so many flowers, directly under the mountains, connected to the wild forest. It was an amazing trip, but it is not the only thing it happened to me. In fact, I also decided to leave Germany… ...

Prelude This is a twin post of - I guess - a good one that I wrote a long time ago: I was just surfing the blog thinking about all I would like to do, and I came to my old thoughts. I was curious, you know? so I read it, and read it once again, I reflected a bit on it - and I found it inspiring in a sense: even better, I would say I found myself surprised to agree with myself of almost 1 year and a half ago, in most of the things I wrote. For me, it was an important moment because it has been like a kind of retrospective. This is the reason I wanted to give this new lifestyle-kind-of post just the same title as his father. Like: I’m still learning. Or even better: I’m still learning - Revenge of the Fallen but I wanna warn you, once again - this is a deeply full-of-truth-and-complaints post - ok no, just kidding. This is more kind of a story, in five Chapters. ...

Disclaimer I’m on a train, back from Frankfurt - Germany, another of the cities to collect together with the ones I visited in this experience abroad in search of myself, trying to figure out who I am and who I want to be. Why this post and what to expect…Well, why, it’s simple: I recently studied a lot and got my AWS certifications (yuppie), I didn’t stop studying because I already planned other exams (really one of a bad idea of mine) and I also started to use my free time to go ahead with a couple of side-projects - they are super time-consuming. Thus, it was a while since I used this blog to… complain, maybe? well, not properly - about something. What. to. expect. It’s difficult to say: this post will be certainly biased. It’s rude, real. This time, I think I will tell some stories about how things went and still going on out there. ...

Software developing and Data science I recently had the chance to think about software developing and data science: it’s not about the fact that I hate everything that contains the word data inside, but I was somehow interdicted by sentences like this. [..] we found that - specially with Amazon retail - we can really accelerate the use of machine learning if not everyone needs to be a data scientist. Although data scientists play an important role, there are many cases in which you just have a smart coder to pick an algorithm instead of developing it all by its self. ...

Preamble In 1962, Hungarian mathematician Tibor Radó introduced the Busy Beaver competition for Turing machines: in a class of machines, find one which halts after the greatest number of steps when started on the empty input. Even if it could seem trivial, the Busy Beaver competition has implications in computability theory, the halting problem, and complexity theory. I decided to use GoLang to implement a Turing machine library and accomplish three goals: first, having a Turing Machine model to play with for learning purpose; second, learning how to use interfaces and the factory pattern, other then testing package to test my code and let it be more flexible for future enhancement (at least I hope!); third, implement some Busy Beaver setup and verify that the model works with well known executions. If you want to discover more about Golang, 60’s math games and beavers, go ahead with reading :D! ...

Preamble I recently bought 4 small smart bulbs - the latest one you most probably decide to buy for your smart home 😂😂 I think it’s useless talk about what you can do: I will only focus on the important things. They DON’T need an hub; They support Alexa; They support Google Assistant; They support IFTTT; There is an app, called Smart Life (iOS, Android) But most important you can build your small SPA in your bathroom. If you are interested, go ahead! ...