In the last year or so I became interested in 75% sized keyboards. I love this design because it strikes a good balance between compactness and functionality — as a programmer, I need my function keys! For Christmas I finally decided to scratch my itch and bought a beautiful optical Keychron K3 off eBay. It’s been a joy to type on, but with a big downside: the battery life is very bad. With…
I recently took a “homework project” for a job interview. What began as a daunting task turned into a pleasurable learning experience of React and Next.js and I got a new tiny project to showcase here. Homework Projects For those who don’t know, job interviews usually begin with a coding interview which consists of about an hour of solving coding problems under a time constraint.…
Lately I wanted to increase my hands-on knowledge about Amazon Web Services (AWS) . For me, the best way to learn a new technology is trying to build something with it. So, I spent some time pondering and come up with a the idea of creating a simple “Twitter like” web application. The requirements I set were: To be able to see all the messages posted in the last 24h. To be able to post…
I recently came back home from a 2 months trip in north and central America. During my travels, I had the pleasure of meeting two retired airline pilots who gave me a great piece of advice: “never make plans that you cannot change, because no plans survive contact with reality” . Of course the bigger and distant in time the plan is, the more the quote proves true. It is something that…
I have been dabbling with Unity lately. Linux is my main OS and I have encountered a few headaches setting up my development environment. My Unity/Rider Setup To be able to write scripts in Unity you need to use an external code editor . Of course if you don’t care about auto-completion and debugging you can use any editor, but that’s not a realistic use case. The officially supported…
Introduction For New Year’s Eve 2021, I decided to build a LED matrix that would react to the music being played. I got inspired for this project by visiting the Cyberdog store in Camden Town. I wanted to recreate the same feeling I had when seeing for the first time the awesome DJ booth they have in the basement. I started planning and building it one month before. However the project was…
My engineer friends are surprised when I mention I know and I even wrote code in the D programming language (aka Dlang). D is not exactly a mainstream language. According to the Tiobe Index , which measures programming languages popularity, D doesn’t make the first 20th languages, as of today. Its peak was in 2009 when it reached the 12th position . I discovered D in 2013. I can’t…
This post is a summary of chapter 1 from the book “Designing Data Intensive Applications”. Chapter 1 introduces the fundamental terminology and metrics to evaluate data-intensive applications. At the time of writing, “DDIA” is the number 1 best seller on Amazon in the category “Data Modeling & Design”. In the book, the author, Martin Kleppmann covers the…
In the last couple of years I have been actively investing my savings in the Stock Market. I have learned a lot on how finance works but long story short, I am not interested in investing in the stock market anymore since I came to realize that: I don’t own enough capital to make substantial returns Beating the market average is difficult (it requires a lot of time) Therefore I’m…
This post is a summary of chapter 5 of the book “Clean Code”, entitled “Formatting”. Chapter 5 contains guidelines to use when formatting your code. Code formatting is important. The organization, layout and arrangement of your code is a form of communication. And the quality of communication is what distinguishes a professional developer from a beginner. The Newspaper…
This post is a summary of chapter 4 of the book “Clean Code”, entitled “Comments”. Chapter 4 contains a few examples of what to do and not to do when commenting code. Comments Do Not Make Up for Bad Code Having to write comments is often a failure of writing expressive code. The code itself should be explaining what it is doing. Don’t use a comment when you can…
This post is a summary of chapter 2 of the book “Clean Code”. Entitled “Functions”, Chapter 3 introduces a series of principles to be used when writing functions. Functions deserve a full chapter about them because they are the first level of abstraction in any program. 1. Single-responsibility Principle (SRP) Your function should do one thing and that thing should clearly…
This post is a summary of chapter 2 of the book “Clean Code”. Entitled “Meaningful Names”, Chapter 2 introduces a series of principles to be used when naming variables, functions, arguments, classes, and packages. At the time of writing, “Clean Code” is the number 3 best seller on Amazon in the category “Software Design, Testing & Engineering”. In…
Hello world! Last week I got a back injury after a long streak of attending Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu sparring sessions. So I am now forced to take rest and I have decided to build my personal website to host my portfolio and blog. In the past I would have built everything from scratch, which is fantastic to learn a lot. However it is quite stupid to waste 80% of my time reinventing the wheel and 20%…
I was scouting Amazon and eBay for a controllable light to bring to parties, but I was left disappointed. The low end market is full of low power lights which are not bright enough and are controlled through a lousy remote controller. To get decent devices you need to go in the high end space where you can easily spend a few hundreds quids. So I thought I should come up with my own solution. I…
Introduction In Jan 2018, shortly after my graduation, I was offered a contract to work for a team of PhD students lead by Prof. Piero Fraternali . The team operated as part of the “Department of Electronics, Information and Bioengineering” inside the university of Politecnico di Milano . I was hired to develop a Geographical Information System (GIS) from scratch to provide good…
Intro In parallel to my master studies I enrolled in an honor program called Alta Scuola Politecnica . The greatest thing about this program has been the graduation project which consisted in a collaboration with a real business. I joined a team of brilliant colleagues, from different backgrounds in management engineering, mechanical engineering and physics. Together we acted as a consulting team…
This game was made in 48h, for a local game jam that I organised with friends when I still was in University (good times). This game is a remake of a Microsoft classic: SkiFree . The protagonist is supposed to be Santa Claus, in case you were wondering. I consider game jams great experiences for learning how to be pragmatical developers. Given the short time available one needs to focus on…
Intro For me, Minecraft could easily be the greatest game of all time. The main reasons being that it is a “meta-game”, a game that allows you to build other games. Minecraft The first time I played it I was confused by the absence of a story to follow or objective to complete. But the more I played it, the more I started to be addicted because I was building my own world and creating…
Intro In 2013, all my friends were playing Ruzzle on their smartphones. It was the viral game of the year but I was the only one not playing it. I only had a dumbphone so I could not join in the fun. I was fascinated by how addicting the game was, given its simplicity, and I started thinkering how I could replicate it. Analysis The game is written in D because at the time I was looking to replace…
Intro “Jump And Run” is a game I developed towards the end of high school and the first project I am really proud of. I was always attracted by the idea of building my own game but I had never tried it before. I had some basic experience with graphics from reading books and articles online but I only dabbled with some small graphical demos that I made during the long boring ours in our…