Python

Introduction I recently build a Slack command to help me handle actions on my VPC. The only thing you need is an AWS account - Free Tier it’s ok. I recently wrote about how to maximize resources, with particular focus on the number of hours you have in Free Tier - using specific CloudWatch Rules. In this article, I want to describe how I extended my architecture to invoke actions - potentially, all the action provided by Amazon Web Services official SDK(s) - with a single Slack command. I decided to call this slack command HAL because I think it’s a really dangerous command 😜 ...

Introduction In the last months, I worked a lot with GoLang on several projects. Although I’m certainly not an expert, there are several things that I really appreciate about this language: first, it has a clear and simple syntax, and more than once I noticed that the style of the Github developers is very close to the style used in old C programs. From a theoretical point of view, GoLang seems to take the best of all worlds: there is the power of high-level languages, made simple by clear rules - even if sometime they are a little bit binding - that can impose a solid logic to the code. There is the simplicity of the imperative style, made of primitive types with the size in bits in their name, but without the boredom of manipulating strings as array of characters. However, two really useful and interesting features in my opinion are the goroutine and the channels. ...

Introduction I always owned a lot of hard drives: I don’t know why, I always used and still use to look for space to save my data. In the years, I started using disks, then I assembled a HP Proliant to be a Synology Based System - I don’t want to go the cloud because I’m stupid - and… in the last week, I decided to make order in a huge amount of files. The first thing you have to do when you are handling terabytes and terabytes of both well-ordered and no-ordered-at-all data is literaly pray that someone else, like a magician, or druid comes to you with a magic wand and fixes all the mess for free, in a way you do not know but you will like. This article is the right one if you don’t want to pray, you really don’t believe in miracle but you still need to order your stuff. I have done it using elastisearch and kibana! ...

A beautiful childhood I’ve never been a fan of videogames, neither as a child nor today: do not get me wrong, as many guys of my generation I also owned and played with the legendary PlayStation 1 (1995)1 and PlayStation 22 by Sony and the Nintendo Game Boy3. It was fun, but not so much as playing to videogames born a few years before I was born. In the 80s, there were not yet the powerful graphics chips that today can be found with a few hundred euros. How did the videogames work? It’s simple: without graphics. There were many textual games and in my opinion, for many vintage lovers, they would still be cool today. My generation has lost this advantage of literaly building with fantasy the world around a game. So, some days ago I found my self thinking back to Sheldoon Cooper that plays with the game Dungeon in the Big Bang Theory4, or to the kids of Stranger Things by Netflix, or to my father, to whom I gave an original Playstation 1 with the first TombRaider(s), and I asked myself how it would be possible today to play again one of those text games that were so popular in that decade…to the point of deciding to create one of my own. ...

The problems of life Each of us has dreams, aspirations, hobbies, interests, but also hundreds of deadlines, a thousand commitments, ten thousand thoughts, a hundred thousand different problems to cope with every day. I am a computer scientist and personally all these things in my life translate into a huge pile of [things/books/articles/guide/blogs] to read, which by the way are very often interrelated. The situation is more or less this: ...