The lies we tell ourselves

The lies we tell others are for survival. But the lies we tell ourselves… those can kill us! A quote from Ragazzo by Zuzu, which I read recently.

July 28, 2025

Professional decline begins sooner than expected

Luci Gutiérrez, from the linked article. Arthur C. Brooks, in his July 2019 Atlantic article Your Professional Decline Is Coming (Much) Sooner Than You Think, confronts an uncomfortable truth: professional decline begins much earlier than most people expect. The core of Brooks’ argument is based on psychologist Raymond Cattell’s work from the 1940s, which distinguished between fluid and crystallized intelligence. Fluid intelligence—analytical capacity, processing speed, and the ability to solve novel problems—peaks in one’s early thirties and then declines precipitously, which explains why many tech entrepreneurs achieve fame and fortune in their twenties but enter creative decline by age 30. ...

July 23, 2025

Tech promised everything. Did it deliver?

I have had the good fortune of meeting Scott several times at various conferences and the MVP Summits held at Microsoft headquarters in Seattle. Seeing him get emotional in this talk does not surprise me, nor is it unusual for him to criticize the very technology1 that his company promotes. He has always been an entertaining speaker and teacher. As it turns out, the TED format suits him perfectly. Or rather, the way that technology is utilized. ↩︎ ...

July 22, 2025

Just one good thing

In the last year, a mindset shift and approach appeared as a very simple idea: just do one thing, that I want to do today. The one thing can be small or big, easy or labored, fleeting or long. I carve out time to go play drums for two hours, go for a bouldering session, do a shorter 20 minute run, read a page of a book, eat something I’m really excited about, and more. Even on the most difficult day, I can adjust and find the smallest thing that I am excited about and do it. ...

July 22, 2025
Hills of Romagna at sunset

Foothills of Romagna

Between motorcycle rides with my friends from TOMCC Italia and family dinners at sunset, I spent most of the weekend in the foothills of Romagna. I’m fortunate to live close to such beautiful landscapes.

July 21, 2025

Neuromancer in 2025

Neuromancer has become more than just an influential novel; it’s now the blueprint for the entire Cyberpunk genre. Even if you’ve never read it, you’ve felt its impact in nearly every major sci-fi film, TV show, anime, and video game of the past 40 years. Gibson didn’t invent cyberpunk, but he defined it. He created the lexicon—cyberspace, matrix, sprawl—that shaped how we imagine our digital future. Reading Neuromancer for the very first time in 2025 ...

July 14, 2025

What doesn't change

Everyone’s either panicking that AI will replace them or assuming they don’t need to learn anything anymore. Both miss the point entirely. AI amplifies what you already know. If you understand distributed systems, you’ll use AI to build better ones. If you don’t, you’ll use AI to create distributed disasters. The difference? When that AI-generated code breaks in production — and it will — you need to know why. When it doesn’t scale — and it won’t — you need to understand the bottlenecks. When it creates race conditions, memory leaks, or architectural nightmares, GitHub Copilot won’t save you. Your fundamentals will. ...

July 14, 2025

Maintaining curiosity

I believe what’s important isn’t the specific technology itself, but rather maintaining curiosity that always looks toward new alternatives and making technical decisions based on your own judgment rather than simply delegating your choices to popular opinion. In Praise of the Contrarian Stack

July 8, 2025

I'm speaking at DevMarche Summer AI Afternoon

On Thursday, I will be conducting an MCP Server session at the Summer AI Afternoon event organized by DevMarche in collaboration with DevRomagna, the neighbouring development communities. There are more than 50 people signed up already, and I’m so looking forward to meeting old and new friends down South.

July 8, 2025

Cloudflare to introduce pay-per-crawl for AI bots

The biggest news in tech this week (which isn’t over yet) is, without a doubt, that Cloudflare is about to introduce a pay-per-crawl model for AI bots—huge in many ways, as let’s not forget that approximately 20% of internet traffic is routed through Cloudflare. I have many thoughts right now, and it will take some time for them to settle. A good analysis and explanation of why this move is needed and is a good first step can be found in yesterday’s article by Dries Buytaert’s, The Web’s Broken Deal with AI Companies, which I recommend everyone read. ...

July 2, 2025