Recent content on /dev/ by Massimiliano Pippi
Contacts
 
 
 Email: mpippi@gmail.com 
 Website: https://dev.pippi.im 
 Github profile: https://github.com/masci 
 








 Skills
 
 
 Programming: Python (expert), Golang (proficient), C, C++ (prior experiences). 
 Management: I managed distributed teams in the range of 4 to 12 people. 
…
Yet another now page inspired by Derek Sivers . 
 
 
 Last updated: June 25, 2026 
 
 










 📝 Recent writings
 
 
 The coding interview in 2025 
 Python Tooling at Scale: LlamaIndex’s Monorepo Overhaul 
 Turbo charge your template prompts with Banks 
 








 👷…
Very inspiring, going through the book was like listening to the author telling his story to a friend. The style is
minimalistic, no tricks to produce more pages, no repetitions, always straight to the point.
It really makes you want start your own business, and not for the money but rather for the journey and fulfillment.
Over my career, I’ve conducted several hundreds of interviews, written coding exercises, and even designed entire hiring
pipelines. I’ve also screwed up, many many times. 
 On the other side of the fence, I use AI coding tools frequently but not daily. I’m very aware of when they’re a
productivity boost and when they’re a waste of time, money, and…
First book I read from the author, I’m now curious to read the others. For being an essay the prose is a bit strange,
some chapters are shorts, some longer, some seem aphorisms… But you get used to it pretty fast and you get more and
more into the point of view of the author as you progress.
This blog post was hosted in the LlamaIndex Blog, you can
 read it here . 
 When we talk about LlamaIndex, we’re actually referring to an ecosystem consisting of more than 650 Python packages,
mostly Integrations and Packs. All these packages share a single GitHub repository, what engineers fondly call a
“monorepo”. In this article, we’re going to introduce LlamaDev, our new tool…
At the time I’m writing, this is the best book you can read to form an opinion
around the “dysfunctions, risks, and flaws of generative models”
that very rarely reach the mainstream.
The book accurately describes the problems with the current trend of AI development, problems from which large language
models and tools like ChatGPT greatly suffer. Only the book was written before ChatGPT! It’s impressive how actual the
book can be, and even more impressive is learning how these problems have been known for years now and the industry
seems to just not care.
Haystack is an open-source framework. With Haystack you can compose various NLP tools to build applications, with a
particular focus on Large Language Models. Haystack was built before the “ChatGPT revolution”. Same as many others in
this industry, we had to question all the existing assumptions in order to adapt, and we had to do it fast. 
 In this talk, we’ll explore the…
Great read as any biography from Walter Isaacson, it’s a massive volume but it was very enjoyable and fast to read.
Love him or hate him, Musk is a very influential individual for our time, and the book unveiled for me several
details about the events that made him “Elon”.
I can’t recall another time when reading a book made me uncomfortable. The book is supposed to teach you how to set up
a strong culture in your company but to do so it uses examples from: a controversial military leader, a feudal system
well known for its rigid hierarchies, a perpetrator of multiple genocides and last but not least, a prison gang leader.
I kinda see the idea…
This book is a masterpiece: the metaphor of the atlas, the many thorough notes, the data behind each chapter is just
amazing. The author also shows fine technical skills that let her jump from politics to hardware and algorithms
flawlessly as the narrative requires. This book is an eye-opener for those who think about modern AI as “software”,
whereas the environmental and…
I am a bit disappointed with this book, because compared to other titles, this is solely dedicated to the role
of Staff Engineer and I was hoping it could go in depth and give more actionable suggestions. Turns out the
only practical advices you can get out of it are in the first pages - it could’ve been a blog post. I wouldn’t
recommend it.
Like many others, I’ve been playing with prompt engineering a lot lately and ended up with my very own prompt template
engine: Banks . Heavily based on Jinja2, the project isn’t really much more than a toy,
but inspired by this langchain tutorial from Pinecone,
I decided to take it out for a spin. 








 A basic example
 
…
This is the first product-management hands-on book I read, and for somebody starting
from zero, I think it does a good job at setting the reader on the right path towards
answering the question “How do you build a product that delights users?”. For me it’s
a reference book - I started experimenting some techniques described in the first
chapters with my team…
Photo by Mark König on Unsplash 
 From Wikipedia: 
 
 Rapid prototyping is a group of techniques used to quickly fabricate a scale model of a physical part 
 








 Good enough
 
 Trying out a physical product for a fraction of its cost can be extremely effective, in fact we do
the same with software. We draw sketches and…
This is a must read for your non-tech savvy audience: parents, kids, your friends
who think they know how to navigate the Internet. It’s not very technical and can be
easily understood with a minimum of familiarity with the modern devices that are
normally available in our houses.
Must-read for anybody interacting with other cultures, whether it’s for work or not. I had several ah-ah! moments
reading the book, it can be a life-saver if you struggle at times navigating people situations: very often it’s a
cultural problem that you’re facing, and you can work around it if you know where it stems from. 
 Can be used as a reference tool, getting to…
Very much like “The Manager’s Path”, this is another book you should keep on your desk
and access randomly as you need it. Most of the “small things” target upper management
but I recommend this book to line managers and individual contributors too as this is
a good reference for what you should expect from your manager.
The book consists of two, very different parts, plus a case study from the ING bank. Part one
is a must read explanation of how DevOps practices can massively impact the business in a positive
way and why. The second part is an explanation of the science that supports the claims presented in
Part two.
The 360 degree feedback (or just “360 feedback”) is named after the multiple sources from where the
feedback is gathered: it can be upward (from somebody reporting to that person), downward (from that
person’s managers) and lateral (from a peer, or from a cross-functional team member). I don’t resort
very often on the 360 feedback “as a process”, but…
I liked the fact that the book is short, goes straight to the point, contains mostly
practical advices and methods to manage an engineering team (the target audience in my
opinion is line managers). Similarly to “The Manager’s Path” by Camille Fournier, you
can keep this book on your desk and use it whenever you need it, like a manual.
From time to time, I get various declinations of the same question: why did you decide to move
to engineering management? It’s not necessarily in job interviews: it might be a colleague, somebody
I’m mentoring, or a friend of mine. Even my wife asks, sometimes out of genuine curiosity, other
times more in a “why did you do this to yourself” fashion - so I…
I was skeptical at first because leadership and management style in the military are not really
my cup of tea, but this is different: the author seems to have the same feelings, except he was
a submarine commander in the US Navy.
I read this book because a colleague highly recommended it to me, but it took me a while to get into it. The basic
concept of intrinsic vs. extrinsic motivation is really easy to grasp, but at a first glance the book might seem
repetitive. Well, it’s not, and the many details and nuances around the main concept are the real value proposition
of this book. 
 I collected plenty…
This blog post was hosted in the Arduino Engineering Blog, you can
 read it here . 
 The Arduino CLI is an open-source command line application written in Golang that can be used from a terminal to
compile, verify and upload sketches to Arduino boards, and that’s capable of managing all the software and tools
needed in the process. But don’t get fooled by its name: the Arduino CLI…
This blog post was hosted in the Arduino Engineering Blog, you can
 read it here . 
 The Arduino IoT Cloud platform aims to make it very simple for anyone to develop
and manage IoT applications and its REST API plays a key role in this search for
simplicity. The IoT Cloud API at its core consists of a set of endpoints exposed
by a backend service, but this alone is not enough…
I believe this is the mother of all the management books I’ve read so far: I can trace
back most of the concepts that nowadays are common in engineering management to a
paragraph, or a simple quote from this book.
This blog post was hosted in the Arduino Engineering Blog, you can
 read it here . 
 GitHub Actions is the name of the SDLC
(Software Development Life Cycle) system introduced by GitHub about a year ago,
currently in public beta and now approaching the general availability status.
When you read SDLC, think about some sort of CI/CD system that’s generic enough
to let you…
A few months ago I had the chance to play with the first Beta of GitHub Actions 
but for some reasons it didn’t click for me: the point-and-click interface, the
HCL syntax and the confusion in the market place put me back to my comfort zone,
in the good company of the usual CI/CD systems we all have been using for years now. 
 Fast forward to a few weeks ago, when GitHub…
You completed the tour, learned the language, got your pet project on Github.
Time to start a new project, a big one: how do you organize code, tests, docs?
During the talk I’ll try to save you some trial and error by sharing the lessons
learned during a year spent coding a non trivial Go project. 
 There’s no silver bullet to organize a non trivial Golang project, only…
This blog post was hosted in the Datadog Engineering Blog, you can
 read it here . 
 If you look at the new Datadog Agent ,
you might notice most of the codebase is written in Go, although the checks we
use to gather metrics are still written in Python. This is possible because the
Datadog Agent, a regular Go binary, embeds a CPython interpreter that
can be called whenever…
This is not about agile management theory, something I know very little about; this is what I do to keep a small team of engineers on track without allocating 100% of my time to management. If you keep reading, you’ll see how I didn’t invent anything and how this is only “yet another way” of composing existing tools and practices in order to implement a process that works…
This blog post was hosted in the Datadog Engineering Blog, you can
 read it here . 
 Recently we extended the Datadog Agent to
support extracting additional metrics from Kubernetes using the
 kube-state-metrics 
service. Metrics are exported through an HTTP API that supports
 content negotiation 
so that one can choose between having the response body in plain text…
Success stories about rewriting Python applications in Go are not big
news anymore. The pros and cons are well known, best practices are in
place, and the standard library is there to help. 
 But what if you want to keep some of your Python code? When we chose
to port the Datadog Agent to Go, we needed to maintain support for our
existing library of plugins written in Python.…
Rumor has it recently that a growing number of Python developers are migrating to Go through an impressive series of success stories;
even if we don’t know the real numbers and it’s difficult to make a detailed picture of this phenomenon, the fact that Python
devs are interested in Go is out of the question, just go to some mailing list, blog or Twitter account and check out…
Porting to mobile a Qt desktop application that lets you draw molecules, crunches numbers, stores data, displays plot and graphs it’s something that goes far beyond converting a QWidget to a Qml component. You have to change user’s perspective, merging what they expect from a mobile application with what they expect from a scientific software. You have to
outsource heavy computational…
Django was actively supported at an early stage of the Python runtime in App Engine SDK
through the notable django-nonrel framework, a fork of the original project that adds
support for NoSql databases. But starting from the App Engine SDK 1.6.2, released more
than two years ago, you can instead deploy Django’s official releases and take advantages
from the whole stack of the…
Yes, code might be poetry, showing the elegance of the verses, rhythm, expressiveness;
but without good documentation that explains what it does, you will likely end up with
unsatisfied users or no users at all. 
 If anyone had told me I would have spent more time writing documentation than coding,
I would not have believed it, but that was before I discovered a simple but…
Perché sarà pur vero che il codice ha l’eleganza del verso, può avere un suo ritmo e la sua espressività,
ma senza una buona documentazione che ne spieghi il funzionamento, difficilmente avrete degli utenti
soddisfatti. 
 Se mi avessero detto che avrei finito con lo spendere molto più tempo sulla documentazione di un progetto
che sul codice non ci avrei mai creduto, ma era…
What is poetry?
 
 Before starting, let’s agree on some terminology. Obviously poetry is a literary form, a way to write down things I would say,
but how do you recognize it, how can you say that is poetry and this is not? Well, according to my literary heritage (I’m italian)
something is poetry when it has verse, rhyme and stanza; let’s see what they are and how we can recognize…
Intro
 
 On of the features of Django Appengine Toolkit is simplifying
the work needed to configure Google Cloud Storage as a static files storage for Django applications running on
Google App Engine. Infact all you have to do is writing something like this in your settings.py module: 
 APPENGINE_TOOLKIT = {
 'APP_YAML' : os . path . join(BASE_DIR, 'app.yaml' ),
…
Durante il codelab ciascun partecipante vestirà i panni del full-stack developer, facendosi carico di tutti gli aspetti di un’applicazione web a partire dal backend per arrivare al frontend e curando tutti i dettagli di integrazione. 
 La parte backend verrà sviluppata in linguaggio Python utilizzando Django, noto framework per lo sviluppo di applicazioni web caratterizzato da un ampio set di…
Intro
 
 Django was actively supported at an early stage of the Python runtime in App Engine SDK through the notable
 django-nonrel framework, a fork of the original project that adds support for NoSql databases.
But starting from the App Engine SDK 1.6.2, released more than two years ago, you can instead deploy Django’s official releases
and take advantages from the…
Django sta emergendo come framework di riferimento per lo sviluppo di applicazioni web in linguaggio Python; è facile da usare ed offre un set di funzionalità “full stack” che consente tra le altre cose lo sviluppo rapido di backend con architettura REST. 
 Unite questo alla facilità di deployment di applicazioni web fornita da Google App Engine ed otterrete l’arma definitiva…
Who said authentication?
 
 If you have an HTTP endpoint which requires authentication, chances are that you’re using HTTP Basic auth or
Digest. This was the case, you should immediately stop asking users for their passwords - let’s see why. 
 It’s not a matter of security per-se, I mean HTTP Basic auth is reasonably fine in many situations where…
Foreword
 
 GitHub has a very nice notification system, very similar to a plain old email inbox. You receive a notification which
remains unread until you actually read it; then it’s archived and removed from your inbox , which it happens could remain empty: 
 





 
 
 








 
 
 
 
…
I started writing on a personal blog in November, 2006 and I choose a Wordpress instance at
wordrpess.com at the time, because it was easy and it was free. My old blog 
consists of 79 articles in more than six years and considering the most of them are just suggested
links or citations, it’s not much work in the end. Anyway, I’m trying to start this whole
thing again so…
The authors keep saying a sort of mantra during the book: HRT , an acronym that stands
for Humility, Respect and Trust. Apply this mantra and you will soon become an excellent
team player, whatever your job is.
Perche sprecare memoria e cicli macchina per produrre ad ogni richiesta dei client le pagine di un sito web?
Un sito statico e sorprendentemente veloce, parco nei consumi delle risorse macchina e facile da installare
anche nelle situazioni di web hosting piu` difficili. Mostreremo come un generatore di pagine statiche
(acrylamid) unito ad uno dei linguaggi di templating html piu…