Recent content on Gianluca Fiore
I have always been a huge Pink Floyd fan. Despite what my Spotify stats tell (which I listen to Nick Cave more), Pink Floyd have always had a special place in my music and life. They are the band that I wouldn’t be able to classify, or rate, nor rank. They are outside every category. They stay on their own. 
 I sat down the other day and thought of the best Pink Floyd songs, or at least…
I never loved flying. I tolerated it in the beginning. Then grew fond of it. Until it became the worst possible way of transportation there is. Now I am considering renouncing flying altogether. 
 Sounded a bit dramatic, didn’t it? Oh well, imagine how strong is my frustration with flying then. 
 Premise: I am an old flyer. I started boarding planes in the mid 1990s. Before low cost…
Bali. Just the word evokes lush forests, rice terraces, yoga, coffee houses, dawn treks, and digital nomading. I didn’t particularly go for any of those but would be unfair to assert that I wasn’t captivated a bit by each. I found them all, but wasn’t fully satisfied by any. 
 Rewind to 2021. Coronavirus pandemic and all that. I was going to travel to Bali for the first time…
The King and the God are gone. 
 Pelé was a totem. And a scary one at that. For a kid growing up in Naples during the 80s, Pelé was not a tangible experience but a myth already. Somebody who we would all compare to, as the archetype of the great footballer from South America. 
 He was a scary figure. Scary because for a city being dragged to the top of the league, twice, by Maradona, Pelé…
I rarely had a useful meeting. I can count on the fingers of one hand the truly important, making-things-go-forward meetings I had in the last year. And yet, I regularly have to endure them. Daily. 
 As a Technical Writer, you’d expect meetings to be worthwhile sources of info and insight. And don’t get me wrong, they can be. But they aren’t in the form that most companies…
Client : HCA Florida 
 Job : content authoring, technical writing, website designing 
 Overview : redesigning and refreshing content of the HCA Florida hospitals
and doctors websites 
 Sample link : HCA Florida Healthcare 
 Audience : general public and patients 
 More info : the CMS is Sitecore. I was assigned a few mock-ups of the final
pages and had to build the…
I wrote about the Pulse 15 in my previous review . Usually I don’t review what I buy, neither here nor elsewhere, but I made an exception for this laptop as it was from a small company and geared towards Linux users. Both things I care a lot about when purchasing technology.
If you are interested in purchasing it, the Pulse 15 is still available at Tuxedocomputers, you may want to head…
As a long time Linux user (over 20 years), the quest for a perfect Linux laptop experience has been going on for most of those years. I went through a tiny Asus EEEPc back in the mid 2000s, which served me well for the very limited purposes it could manage (the Atom processors were anything but speedy…). For running Linux with a window manager and writing, browsing and listening to music it…
It’s easy to see how this blog has been neglected for a long time. My fault, obviously. Also my choice . 
 Point being, I’ve been barely thinking and working with my coding projects
since about a year. Why? I got disillusioned . I lost interest in modern
coding practices. 
 Let me be clear: I do like coding and I will be coding in my spare time,
occasionally, forever, probably.…
I was born in Naples, Italy. For those who don’t know it, it’s a place where art, criminality, religiousity, awesome food, the best pizza in the world, strong coffee, the sea, 2 volcanos and greek+roman+christian civilitazions meet and thrive(d) for thousands of years. Not an easy place to be born, nor one that won’t leave you with marks, positive and negatives, for all your…
After the first book, of which I was no more than a contributor, Your First Year In Code , I decided that was fine and actually great fun to write and publish books so I wrote another one :) 
 This one much more personal, about my passion for traveling and in particular to travel alone, something that I have been doing for more than 20 years, nearly each year: How To Travel Solo.
As a football fan, I’m always on the lookout for informations about my favourite teams. I have more than one so the search is not immediate. Most of the time, using multiple websites, I have to click multiple times to see the league standings’ and where is my team is at the moment. Worse, a lot of sport newspapers on the internet don’t immediately give you info about the next…
A few months ago I found the pizza repository of Steve Kinney , a project to list all the best pizzerias around the world. As a fan of pizza and being born in the hometown of it (Naples for those unaware), I started contributing to it pizzerias in Italy and Poland mostly that I knew by first-hand experience were very good. 
 To make a longer story short, slowly the contributions piled up and I…
With my extreme surprise, but also extreme happiness, I published a book! I say
surprise because I didn’t plan to but heard about the awesome Isaac
Lyman and his idea of writing a guide book for new
and aspiring developers, not too techincal but instead full of advices and
knowledge that is geared towards those who are approaching the profession, or
recently started it.…
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It honestly came as a surprise a post on Overreacted by Dan Abramov . He lists all the things he doesn’t know as of 2018, in an attempt to “devalue” in the eyes of newbies any experienced developer by showing off the gaps in knowledge that usually we take for granted, expecially from those developers that work for big companies and who went through a harder interview process.…
Well, first of all, sorry for not updating about my progresses on Frontend development through Freecodecamp curriculum but there were basically none since last May. Why? Work got in the way, with a larger role and more duties taking over little by little the energy I had to focus on coding after work. First reason. 
 Second reason, health issues. I’ve been battling with the most…
I’ve ever been surprised, even amused, by the show of affection friends show in myself. Caring about myself has never been a high priority for me, I admit, so I emotionally recoil whenever an external being cares about my wellbeing more than me. I cannot comprehend it, on an emotional level of course as logically it is natural for friends to care about each other. 
 What surprises me the…
Frontend development was never my area. I’ve always been more of a Backend/System Administrator. I’ve never truly grokked the idea of events, DOM, making requests elsewhere and things running outside my machine, without me giving precise instruction when to run and what arguments to accept. 
 Yet it’s 2018 and Javascript permeates the programming world, whether we like it or…
Why I love coffee: 
 
 It clearly tastes good 
 It is a source of energy 
 No start of the day is right without a proper coffee 
 I love my Espresso machine but the beans are increasingly expensive 
 Fuels my projects (quite literally) 
 It’s like a donation to a friend (internet-friend at most, I know…) 
 



I was reading, as usual, Scott Hanselman’s blog and couldn’t agree more on his complaining on the recent WWDC keynote asserting that programming is easy. From his post : 
 
 When we tell folks - kids or otherwise - that programming is easy, what will they think when it gets difficult? And it will get difficult. That’s where people find themselves saying “well, I…
A few days ago I’ve become the maintainer, and main contributor, of this DuckDuckGo’s Instant answer. It has been deployed on beta.duckduckgo.com only so far, as it is clearly just a beta. 
 My passion for cocktails and carefully mixed drinks is no mistery and thus it was only natural to write such an IA for DuckDuckGo, my main search engine since a few years. It is incomplete, I…
Last month I went back to my hometown , Naples, for New Year’s Eve. Meeting with family and showing the city to girlfriend. A very enjoyable week, I have to say, fun, drinks, good food, visiting as a tourist your old home and rejoining with 2 lovely cats at home :) 
 The trip reinforced my love-hate relationship with Naples. The food is outstanding , it is really, really hard to find…
Or why you should be using it even if you don’t care about privacy or don’t know what a search engine bubble may be. 
 It’s in no way a comprehensive guide nor “the best of” of what DuckDuckGo offers. Just what I find more useful and have been using so far. 
 Time 
 
 days between today and 02/28/2013 = 16 days. Unfortunately, this uses the US…