It is said that sometimes being bored is necessary to cultivate oneself and foster creativity: it certainly was the case for me, as this was why I started programming. I think I was 8 or 9 years old at the time, my family had recently bought a new PS2, and I had plenty of time on my hands. It's sad to think it was almost 20 years ago! Ironically, what brought me to experience game development for the first time was that I had very few games. As a child, I didn't have access to the Internet or t

Once or twice a year, I have a ritual of leaving the big city to return to my home village, in south-eastern Sicily. During these retreats, I have the chance to disconnect from the bustling, relentless Milano, and enjoy a place where industriousness isn't the only religion. Clean air, warmer temperatures, and chirping nightingales: in other words, I created my own flavour of the Roman otium to work peacefully and meditate on my next steps. On a quiet morning like others, I was immersed in this

I feel a special connection to New Year's Eve, even more so than with Christmas itself. I guess part of it is the pleasure of turning the calendar year into a new, unseen number: it's like I am suddenly living in the future! This is a time when I generally have high hopes, I playfully think about plans for the following year (not with anxiety, but as foretasting pleasant experiences), and celebrate with others our achievements for the past year. Additionally, I have this ritual of making a big w

My high school teacher often claimed that everyone should study Philosophy. She disagreed with the mainstream vision of Philosophy as a pointless divertissement reserved for out-of-touch and entitled elites or just as a boring discipline from academia, too abstract to be appreciated by street-smart laymen. All in all, she continued, anyone is a potential philosopher because all we need to practice it is already inside ourselves: a rational mind and a genuine curiosity towards the universe we inh

I'm having some fun with AWS Lambda lately. It is cheap, easy to integrate with other services or APIs, and almost effortless to get up and running. Almost.

Among all the impulse purchases of this year, my quadcopter is one I don't regret at all. In general, I was always fascinated by drones (it's understandable, they are flying robots after all) and I like programming stuff - so I decided to get the best of both worlds and go buy my own. The market offers a few alternatives, but my ideal drone had to feature the following must-haves: * it would be programmable in a full-fledged language like C or Python * it would have at least a camera, and may

I hate bugs. Please, don't misunderstand me: I don't necessarily despise looking into errors and fixing them. In fact, sometimes investigating bugs can be exceptionally rewarding and makes me feel like a hard-boiled detective. No, what I hate is that they break my illusion of being some kind of magician, muttering powerful spells in the shape of lines of code and bending reality to my will. According to my ideal, microservices should harmonically run together, with no hiccups, no breaks, and no