Devromagna

I’ve been slacking a little lately, shocked mainly by what is happening worldwide. I’ve also been busy at work and, unfortunately, am taking my old man to way too many medical checkups. A short recap of notable facts might be in order. FatturaElettronica for .NET 3.6 has been released. It adds support for the upcoming technical specifications v1.9 that are coming into effect on April 1, 2025 (not a joke.) The changelog is here. I did some maintenance work on Eve. The CI workflow has been switched to ubuntu-latest from 20.04, as the latter is about to be sunsetted by GitHub. I also merged two pull requests (#1541 and #1547), one of which was long-standing. There isn’t enough material for a release, although the guys who submitted the PRs might think otherwise (if that’s the case, let me know.) I ran two DevRomagna meetups. The first one was on OpenTelemetry and was kept by Alessandro Mengoli, of whom I’m very proud (I’ve been encouraging him to start speaking for a long time.) The second was on Linux Containers but before Docker. The speaker was Gabriele Santomaggio, my go-to buddy regarding low-level networking stuff. I found both events to be quite successful and enjoyable. I hope the other attendants agree. I finally deactivated my Twitter/X account. I abandoned the platform a while ago and did not miss it. I maintain a presence on Mastodon and Bluesky, mainly to propagate whatever content I post on my website, but don’t count on me following or reading you there (same with LinkedIn.) I’m not active on social media and don’t see myself getting back into them. I’m not interested anymore (and the content there is mostly trash.) I went on a nice hike a couple of weeks ago. It was cold and overcast, and that’s why, I suspect, I did not meet a single person the whole day. Speaking of hiking, I finally got myself a Garmin inReach Mini 2 device. It’s meant to be used in case of emergency. It allows me to call for help and send sms messages even when no cell signal is available (it uses the Iridium satellite network.) I resisted getting it so far because of the high cost, not so much of the device itself, but the mandatory subscription. Only recently, I found that one can buy Garmin data plans from other vendors, and ProteGear has a nice option to suspend the subscription when not in use. So, I bought the device from Garmin, activated it, and subscribed to ProteGear. It’s looking good so far, and sending sms messages (and emails!) when there’s no cell signal feels like black magic. I’ve been reading good books, and I’m grateful for them. Well, my dad is not doing well. He’s okay now, but he’s been going through a lot, and more is expected soon. That’s life, I know. I am having difficulty making peace with what is happening in the world right now. American friends, I cannot understand how you could re-elect Donald Trump for a second term. It beats me. I am in shock and worried about the geopolitical consequences. I hope time will prove me wrong, but the future looks grim.

We’re doing a DevRomagna meetup on container security. It will happen on June 26 at 7pm, it will be in Italian, and the speaker will be the one and the only Ugo Lattanzi. Details and signup here.

I know this is coming in a bit late; apologies, but… We’re doing a Web Performance meetup at DevRomagna today. Andrea ‘Verlok’ Verlicchi, a Google Developer Expert specialing in web performance, will share his extensive experience in web performance and provide practical, high-impact, and easily applicable tips on improving performance in 2023. Info and signup here.

We’re doing a DevRomagna meetup this month, and I think it will be a super-interesting one. It’s titled Heading to Go: A Look at Building a Video Encoder and the presenter will be Daniel Enrico Botta, a C# software engineer who recently switched to Go for his video encoding projects. Here’s the abstract: This talk will discuss the experience of moving from C# to Go for a video coding project. The pros and cons of using Go, a modern and efficient programming language, and how it compares to other languages will be shown. In addition, the use of FFmpeg, an open-source tool for video encoding, and how it was used to create the video encoder will be discussed. Advice will be given on using Go and Ffmpeg for future projects. Together, the benefits of using these tools for video encoding will be understood. ...

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. ...