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On Sunday afternoon, I suddenly decided to take my motorcycle, ride to the foothills, leave the bike there, and hike the Monte Mauro loop, including the climb to the summit. The Monte Mauro loop is a classic route in the Vena del Gesso area. Wooded areas alternate with exposed stretches below the summit of Monte Mauro, where you literally walk on chalk outcrops. The trail is well marked, but you have to pay attention to the path because there are often alternatives (also marked) that can confuse you. It is an enjoyable short tour. ...

Finally some good news for us old farts! Cognitive ability (probably) peaks between 50 and 60.

Last year, Ashley and a large team of scientists conducted an elaborate experiment on the effects of exercise on the mammalian body. In one test, Ashley put rats on tiny treadmills, worked them out for weeks, and cut into them to investigate how their organs and vessels responded to the workout compared to a control group of more sedentary rodents.1 The results were spectacular. Exercise transformed just about every tissue and molecular system that Ashley and his co-authors studied—not just the muscles and heart, but also the liver, adrenal glands, fat, and immune system ...

A few weeks ago, we accompanied Anna to Amsterdam, where she will study at the University. She is our youngest daughter. Marco left home years ago to study in France, where he graduated, and now lives in Brussels, and Giulia is in her third year of medical school, also living in another town. After twenty-plus years, the nest is empty. It’s a strange feeling wandering around the house knowing that none of the kids are around. Despite feeling nostalgic, Serena and I are doing well. We’re getting used to this new life as a seasoned couple. ...

Sometimes we feel confusion going through the code. Confusion costs time and money. Confusion is caused by high cognitive load. It’s not some fancy abstract concept, but rather a fundamental human constraint. It’s not imagined, it’s there and we can feel it. Since we spend far more time reading and understanding code than writing it, we should constantly ask ourselves whether we are embedding excessive cognitive load into our code. ...

Brent Ozar’s article below resonates with my post-COVID experience as a conference speaker. From big national and international conferences to local meetups like the one I run, attendance has been dwindling following the hiatus. Of all the proposed reasons, I believe “people switched how they’re learning” is crucial; just think about YouTube, LLMs, and the plethora of free and paid online courses. Why Aren’t People Going to Local and Regional In-Person Events Anymore? ...

This is the story of the world’s most beloved programming language: Python. What began as a side project in Amsterdam during the 1990s became the software powering artificial intelligence, data science and some of the world’s biggest companies. But Python’s future wasn’t certain; at one point it almost disappeared. Python: The Documentary

The first-line treatment for ADHD is stimulants. Everything else in this post works best as a complement to, rather than as an alternative to, stimulant medication. In fact most of the strategies described here, I was only able to execute after starting stimulants. For me, chemistry is the critical node in the tech tree: the todo list, the pomodoro timers, etc., all of that was unlocked by the medication Notes on Managing ADHD ...

The most recent project I worked on is Invoicetronic, a modern API for complete management of the electronic invoicing cycle in Italy (FatturaPA/SDI). We had long used an internal API by our accounting software, which was also utilized by thousands of our end users. We decided to make our experience and expertise available to external developers, allowing them to integrate electronic invoicing into their applications quickly via a public API. Thus, the Invoicetronic project was born. ...

From roughly the late 80s until the mid-90s, every month I would visit the newsstand at my city’s train station, hoping to snag the single copy of BYTE Magazine that arrived in town (at least one other hunter was competing with me: I often won, but not always, which frustrated me tremendously). I understood little to nothing with my rudimentary school English, but I was too stubborn to give up. I credit BYTE Magazine as one of my significant English teachers. Flipping those pages was exciting, and, as unbelievable as it may seem today, back then the advertisements were just as captivating as the articles themselves. Granted, I was also reading Italian computing magazines, but most were copycats of the one authoritative source 1. ...