Recent content on Tommaso Colella | SWE
Last week I presented a speech at Linux Day 2025, in Prato , about meta-search engines. Specifically, I was talking about SearXNG. While preparing the slides for the speech, I came across articles talking about “AI Overview”, the new feature/product by Google Search giving out answers for your queries in a LLM generated box on top of standard search results. According to many sources,…
I love listening to podcasts, and news in general. For a couple of years, I’ve been subscribed to a somewhat-niche (but really high quality) Italian weekly magazine. I like their Android application, and I use its Text To Speech functionality, but there’s a big problem with that: it’s impossible to increase the audio reproduction speed. I usually listen to articles while doing…
If you’re a bookworm like me, you can’t resist the fascination of the paper medium. Reading a proper book is a much more relaxing experience than reading on a screen. Some studies also found a correlation between phone usage in bed and increased risk of having poor sleep quality. These are some reasons I’ve always preferred reading from paper books, especially at nighttime.…
Recently, we had a couple of naming-related incidents at work. We respect certain naming conventions, but sometimes errors slip into our Terraform infrastructure’s code, and remediation may be costly. I had to find a way to simplify resource naming policy enforcement: at first, I thought about using Git Hooks (with a custom HCL parser) or local linters. Both of these approaches came with…
A friend asked me to create a Telegram channel to cross-post my articles onto (I did! You can find it here ). The idea seemed nice, but I didn’t want to bother with writing a small summary for each article every time, and most of all, forgetful as I am, I would absolutely forget to post to the channel. I only had one choice: automate everything using GitHub Actions, Azure Function Apps, and…
It’s impossible to keep up with the rapid developments in the field of LLMs. On Feb 21, Google released a new family of models called Gemma. These models promise top performance for their size. According to the Gemma technical report , the 7B model outperforms all other open-weight models of the same or even bigger sizes, such as Llama-2 13B. 💡According to the technical report accompanying…
On December 12th, Microsoft released their latest “SML” or “Small Language Model” Phi-2. This new model is MIT-Licensed. The permissive license makes it a perfect candidate for any experimentation, be it academic or commercial. Phi-2 is also a somewhat “green” model. The model was trained with a lot less power than some of its bigger cousins LLama-2 or Mistral,…
Lately, some friends have asked me to cooperate on a scientific paper regarding LLMs. As part of this collaboration, I had to assess the feasibility of the automatic deployment of an LLM on a public cloud. I’m lucky enough to work at a company focusing on AI and Microsoft-oriented system integration, and we’re always looking for new ways to bring value to the market using cutting-edge…
I’m a Software Engineer based in Florence, Italy. I have a BSc in Computer Science from the University of Pisa, and I’m currently completing my MSc. I’m working as Tech Lead and Cloud Architect for Avanade. My interests lie in distributed architectures, LLMs, and programming languages. You can find me either writing code or listening to music by some unknown band. Stuff I’m experienced…