“Kublai Khan does not necessarily believe everything Marco Polo says when he describes the cities visited on his expeditions, but the emperor of the Tartars does continue listening to the young Venetian with greater attention and curiosity than he shows any other messenger or explorer of his.” So begins Italo Calvino’s compilation of fragmentary urban images. As Marco tells the khan about Armilla, which “has nothing that makes it seem a city, except the water pipes that rise vertically where the houses should be and spread out horizontally where the floors should be,” the spider-web city of Octavia, and other marvelous burgs, it may be that he is creating them all out of his imagination, or perhaps he is recreating fine details of his native Venice over and over again, or perhaps he is simply recounting some of the myriad possible forms a city might take. ...

After two years of avoiding it, I finally got Covid. First two days, I had a few symptoms but was testing negative (it was likely to be Covid because one of my daughters was positive.) On day three, I tested positive. It’s ten days now, but only during the first three or four I didn’t feel good: a light fever, pinching throat, some coughing and sleepiness, that’s all. I did not have to miss any working days (I’m self-employed) and only had to skip two of my daily training routines1. I’m in my early fifties, healthy, fully vaccinated and boosted. ...

Today, probably not just by coincidence, I came across Becoming the Emperor, an excellent New Yorker piece from 2005 on Memoirs of Hadrian, Yourcenar’s other works, and her peculiar career and life trajectory. Having just read the Memoirs, I was glad to see several of my reading impressions confirmed. I found the New Yorker article to be spot-on on Yourcenar’s prose and theme: Actually, some of Yourcenar’s prose is marmoreal, but not so that you can’t get through it. Also, it is beautiful. What made her remarkable, however, was not so much her style as the quality of her mind. Loftiness served her well as an artist: she was able to dispense love and justice, heat and cold in equal parts. Above all, her high sense of herself gave her the strength to take on a great topic: time. ...

I just released Eve-Swagger v0.2 on PyPI. Eve-Swagger is a Swagger/OpenAPI extension for Eve powered RESTful APIs. This maintenance release addresses a few issues and adds support for eve-auth-jwt. Many thanks to Roberto Romero for his contributions to this release.

Memoirs of Hadrian and its author Marguerite Yourcenar have always induced a cautious fear in me. I fretted the tome for high literary circles, one of those texts so infused with learned quotations and obscure literary references as to be utterly indigestible to the average reader. Despite their evident reputation, I relegated the Memoirs to the bottom of my reading list for a long time. When I stumbled on another reference to Yourcenar’s work a couple of weeks ago, I finally decided to plunge and pull the Memoirs off the shelf. ...

Stripe docs are a marvel, and every developer who’s had to deal with them knows it. After years of painful PayPal interactions, I remember the amazement and the feverish grin on my face the first time I landed on their API reference. Stripe API is beautifully designed, but it’s the combination of good design and excellent documentation that paved Stripe’s fulgid success. A few days ago, they unexpectedly released MarkDoc, the “powerful, flexible, Markdown-based authoring framework” they use internally to build their documentation. I skimmed through it only rapidly and, unsurprisingly, got a great first impression. ...

Last week, thanks to Andrea Verlicchi1’s effort, we ran the first in-person DevRomagna event since 2019. We did some meetups during the pandemic, some in 2020 and a couple in 2022, but they were all online. In theory, online meetups and DevRomagna are a match made in heaven. The Romagna region consists of small same-size towns scattered in the vast countryside. To accommodate this, and in an attempt to encourage varied participation, DevRomagna has always been a roaming meetup. We might be in one place one month, and then, next month, we will likely move to another town. With online meetups, attendance doesn’t have to commit to a commute saving time and money and allowing everyone to participate in events that would otherwise be too far away. ...

In 1982, at just twenty-three years old and halfway through her architectural studies, Elspeth Beard left her family and friends in London and set off on a 35,000-mile solo adventure around the world on her 1974 BMW R60/6. Exhausted by a recent breakup and with only a few savings scraped together from her job in a pub, a tent, a few clothes and some tools, all packed on the back of her bike, she was determined to prove herself. ...

One of my pet peeves has always been the many different, sometimes very original ways in which CLI tools handle help requests. POSIX sets the canon: -h or --help is how we ask for help. But no, some tools1 want to be original at the worst moment: when their users are struggling, looking for guidance. It’s somewhat consolatory to learn that I’m not alone in this fight. The other day I landed on Clayton Craft’s blog. His [rant on the topic][2] splendidly concludes with the following assessment: ...

I went back to my library to check the year of my original Neuromancer edition. It’s 1993. For some context, I was 23 back then, with my software company founded only a couple of years earlier. The World Wide Web was at its very early stages. I distinctly remember getting out of that book dazed and confused. Characters were two-dimensional at best. There was a certain lack of exposition. The recurring streams of consciousness were complex for me to follow1. I knew I had something powerful and innovative in my hands; I was fascinated, but Gibson’s writing, I think, put me off2. ...