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I presented a session at the .NET Conference Italia 2025 in Milan a couple of weeks ago. The title was “Integrating our applications with LLMs and AI via MCP Servers”. It was well received; there were good questions throughout the talk and in the hall afterward. Surprisingly, live coding and demos went relatively smoothly. The fine guys at ASP Italia just published the video in case someone is interested. Yeah, it is in Italian. I got a transcript from MacWhisper and then asked Claude to translate and clean it up. It did a pretty good job, so let me know if there’s any interest in an English transcript; I might post it here. ...

The story that the Python micro web framework Flask started as an April Fool’s joke is well known in Python circles, but it was nice to see it told by Armin Ronacher himself1. I’m fond of Flask. It was a breath of fresh air when it came out, and most of my Python open-source work is based on it. The video is produced by the people who also authored the remarkable Python: The Documentary. ↩︎ ...

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

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. ↩︎ ...

A walk on the beach right after the storm. Lots of logs scattered all around, for miles. And sanderlings running all over the place.

For nerds of my generation, Infocom is a legend. Today, I watched the long-time overdue Infocom: The Documentary and I found it to be a gem. With no commentary or narration but made up of the protagonists’ testimonies alone, it effectively evokes the excitement and enthusiasm around the early computer game industry (and software development in general) of those early years. It is also a cautionary tale about how easy it is to fall once you reach the peak1 ...

We spent a weekend in Venice1 a short while ago, and one of the things that caught my attention was the wells in the city’s squares. Is there fresh water underneath that brackish swamp water? Well, no. The water from the wells in Venice is rainwater, collected by an ingenious hydraulic collection system that leveraged the square and surrounding buildings. I learned this and other intriguing tidbits by watching The Crazy Engineering of Venice on YouTube. ...

I took a walk on the beach last weekend. I never frequent Lido Adriano. It is much better than I expected, especially out of season.

I went for a walk in the local pinewood the other day. It’s one of my favorite places, especially the least frequented parts, where one can walk for hours (and risk getting lost) without meeting anyone. I cut it shorter this time as it started to drip rain, and I had nothing with me.