Recent Blog Posts

In principle and the traditional vision, the roles were clear enough. Upstream developers had to create and support their own projects, including multiple libraries, tools and modules, possibly for multiple operating systems. Distribution maintainers had the responsibility of collecting a significant software set, porting on various architectures, choosing versions that work well together for each piece of software, patching for coherence and well-established policies, eventually providing a build and installation system for the end users. At the end of the day, a quite complicated and articulated work that many people out there do for fun, others as a full-time job.

We recently returned from our traditional Dolomites holiday period, and while there I eventually managed to read the first novel written by Salvatore Sanfilippo aka antirez. Most of you probably know Salvatore because he has been for a long time the leading developer of Redis until he came out from the company that now holds the ownership of the project, some years ago. He often compared the creative work of a developer with that of a novelist and I was curious about his first book.

A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away... I used to have a personal home page hosted somewhere. That was one of many other side projects of my life. I discovered some years ago that having multiple failed side projects along the way is a common experience for geeks and for many non-geek people, too. For reasons that are still not completely clear to me, some months ago, I decided that restarting a personal website in 2024 could be a not so weird idea.