Personal website and blog
An adult autism diagnosis shouldn't be a luxury. Two reflections: on the privilege of being able to afford one, and on how to start understanding yourself even before a formal diagnosis.
My new album: nine original tunes, complete with downloadable lead sheets in PDF and MuseScore format.
In June 2026, at fifty-one, I was diagnosed with Autism Spectrum Disorder, level 1. It wasn't a surprise: it was a confirmation.
Paolo Nori says a madman is a useless masterpiece. I think exactly the opposite: he is an extremely useful masterpiece, in fact a necessary one.
A door taken off its hinges, then a mind taken off its hinges, then a compliment. The slow journey of a metaphor that still works because of the hinge it pictures.
How a Trojan prince's name became a verb for browbeating. The seventeenth-century London gangs that stole it, and what hectoring still names that argument and anger do not.
How to get the Touch ID prompt to work with sudo on macOS, including the pam_reattach workaround needed inside terminal multiplexers like zellij and tmux.
An old word for an old kind of joy — where frolic comes from, why its k quietly fell off, and what the word still protects that its more serious cousins do not.
A practical tour of the until loop: syntax, when it reads better than while, and five real-world examples for waiting on services, files, ports, retries, and background jobs.
On the checkered paper under the pizza, the sketches drawn between a Margherita and a Diavola, and the grease ring that landed squarely on the retry policy.
The small doorway that swallows an afternoon — where the phrase comes from, why the internet turned it into a verb, and how to tell a good rabbit hole from a bad one.
On the engineering philosophy of using two independent safeguards for the same failure — and why redundancy is sometimes wisdom, not waste.
A simple pattern for storing structured records in a Bash array and splitting them with IFS.
Retrieval-Augmented Generation — how language models learn to reach outside themselves for facts, and why it matters that they do.
A sceptical metaphor for what large language models are doing when they sound like they understand us — where the phrase came from, and why it still stings.
The small wrongness of an almost-human face — why it unsettles us, where the term comes from, and why the valley is no longer confined to robotics labs.
I built a $0.99 app that strips tracking parameters from every URL you copy. Here's why, and how it works.
A collection of user presets I made for Noises, the beautifully crafted noise generator instrument by AudioThing.
A before-and-after comparison showing how Bruce turns 20+ lines of JCA boilerplate into clean, readable code for digital signatures in Java.
The experience of the self dissolving — what it is, where the term comes from, what neuroscience is starting to say about it, and why it matters.
The hypnotic curves traced by two sinusoids plotted against each other — and why mix engineers stare at them to keep stereo images honest.
A cognitive theory of autism that frames it not as a deficit, but as attention flowing in a single, deep channel rather than many parallel ones.
Flattering the powerful at the cost of the truth — an ancient corrosive habit, and its strange comeback as a technical term in AI alignment.
The three rotational axes of any rigid body moving through space — tilt, nod, turn — and why these three nautical words ended up running half the modern world.
The sense of the internal state of the body — how the brain perceives signals from inside you, and why it matters for emotion, intuition, and health.
Get in touch with Mirko Caserta through various channels including email, GitHub, Telegram, YouTube, Instagram, Spotify, and BandCamp.
Learn more about Mirko Caserta, a Senior Developer in Rome, Italy, who works on enterprise backends and is passionate about technology, music, and amateur radio.
A static site generator developed entirely with Claude AI assistance, showcasing the power of AI-driven development in Rust and the revolutionary impact of AI coding tools.
Complete professional profile of Mirko Caserta, Senior Developer and Software Architect with over 30 years of experience in enterprise software development, cloud platforms, and diverse technology stacks.
An improvised music album inspired by ecclesiastical themes, featuring the sound of Hans Zimmer's organ from Interstellar and reflections on my early days as a church organist.
Essential Firefox extensions for productivity and privacy: cookie management, Google tracking prevention, ad blocking, and secure password management.
How to post to Mastodon using just an HTTP client
A list of software I use every day that is essential in everything I do.
A personal collection of piano ballads featuring jazz standards and heartfelt interpretations, recorded with sincerity and minimal editing to capture authentic musical moments.
An instrumental album by Mirko Caserta
A musical collection inspired by the simplicity and beauty of Bach's approach to composition, featuring personal interpretations and reflections on the joy of music-making without pretense.
The story behind my album Until Further Notice, a week of improvisation on keyboards inspired by passive-aggressive office jargon.
Bruce is a Java library that simplifies cryptography operations, making it easy for developers to implement secure encryption, decryption, and hashing in their applications.
A reflection on managing pressure and anxiety in software development, and how to maintain quality while meeting deadlines.
A Matrix-style screensaver for the Commodore 64, written in C using the cc65 toolkit.
A Matrix-style screensaver implementation for Commodore 64 written in 6502 assembly, featuring multiple display modes and interactive controls, inspired by the legendary xmatrix screensaver.
An example of working with time series data and CompletableFuture in Java, covering air quality index calculation with concurrent data retrieval.
An open letter to all people who, like me, suffer from anxiety and panic attacks.
Musical ear is a skill that can be developed through training. Discover how hearing works and how to improve your musical perception through practical exercises.
An imaginary and humorous dialogue with Miles Davis exploring musical themes, jazz, odd time signatures and the life of musicians, written in Roman dialect with cultural and musical references.
Most issues in software development usually arise from poor, inconsistent knowledge of the domain at hand. A topic apparently as simple as time representation, serialization and management can easily cause a number of problems both to the neophyte and to the experienced programmer.
Complete guide for writing effective log messages in Java: best practices for debugging, production monitoring, exception handling, and configuration of modern logging frameworks.
Learn how to extract individual partitions from a complete disk image backup using dd and mount commands.