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SeaweedFS, FreeBSD and a rather deep rabbit hole At this point, reading my blog, you could be forgiven for thinking that I have become entirely about IBM midrange systems, COBOL and offline-first computing. That is still true, in a way. I genuinely enjoy those things. But I am still very much attracted to large, complex architectures, distributed systems, and the sort of infrastructure where…
Cobolito/400: a tiny data appliance in the IBM 5280 lineage I wrote an essay about Cobolito/400, a tiny data appliance built as a tribute to the IBM 5280 and to a style of computing where records, screens, media, and operators still had visible relationships with each other. At the beginning, it was meant to be a blog post. But somewhere between Scottish biscuits and a cup of tea, I got carried…
GixSQL, COBOL and FreeBSD This is more of a small bookmark for my own sake, rather than a full article. I created a tiny repository with working GnuCOBOL, GixSQL and SQLite examples: gnucobol-gixsql-sqlite-examples It is intentionally small. There is one SELECT example, one INSERT example, a tiny SQLite schema, a Makefile, and some notes about the things that were harder to discover than I…
Spring 2026 updates Servus from … a random hotel. I’m sitting cross-legged on the bed in my pyjamas, laptop on my legs. Mx Liebe is sitting beside me, a reminder that he is part of my portable home. I glance outside the window. The sun is starting to set, that small daily proof that the days are getting longer. Outside there is a large walled lorry park, all its lights turned on: a safe…
Where my data lives: storage choices for Project Quiet Ground I decided to write this because it’s one of the fundamental blocks that led me to shape Project Quiet Ground the way it is. Some of this content has been written in bits and pieces in previous posts, but has never been consolidated into a single post. It’s no secret that I always planned for disaster recovery. The reasons…
Project Quiet Ground: the prequel I’m sitting on the sofa in the offline outpost. TV turned on to a fire crackling YouTube video, blanket on, reading a book with Angie by my side. She’s somehow enchanted watching the fire, but still leaning against me, as if making sure I’m still there. All of a sudden, I put the Kindle down, turn to Angie and blurt: “You know… if I…
Flying Solo One of the things I like most when I fly solo is having all the space to myself. The back seats are usually filled with my backpack and jacket, while the right seat holds my iPad, navigation charts, kneeboard, a bottle of water, and occasionally some snacks for longer (and sometimes boring?) flights. Not much different from how I travel by car. After handling take-off procedures and…
Flight record about MinIO I wanted to leave a small flight record for my future self about what happened to MinIO. By the time I reread this, it will be old news. That is fine. This is less about the timeline and more about what it reminded me about my own preferences. I recently wrote about a data-first view of systems, where programs are transient and data is the center of gravity.
Data first, programs as guests Some ideas don’t arrive suddenly. They form slowly, through repetition and exposure, until one day they become visible. Over the years, I’ve noticed that the systems I’ve always felt most at home in share a specific trait. It took me a long time to see the bigger picture and name it clearly. In those systems, data is the center of gravity, not programs. Programs are…
Winter 2025/2026 season update Servus from… South London! Are you ready for a long update? It has been a cold winter in the offline outpost. Cold in the literal sense, temperatures dropped to around -10 °C in my part of Europe, but also cold in the other way. The kind of cold a blanket can’t really fix. Luckily, I had Angie and an LLM to keep me company through the worst days.
A note to the occasional reader I want to leave a small note for the occasional reader who lands here. If you browse through my posts, you may notice that I often return to the same ideas. I circle around familiar themes: offline operations, slow computing, the longing for a wooden cabin in the mountains. Sometimes I write about distributed systems and infrastructure (which is my day job), and…
The Offline Outpost, a tech insight In the post Life of an in-betweener, I wrote that the offline outpost is a place that partially exists and partially imagined. That still holds true. A part of the imagined offline outpost comes from the desire for a much simpler and slower life, represented by a cabin in the mountains, far away from the madness of the city. At the same time, the offline outpost…
Quietly Here It’s Christmas Eve here at the offline outpost. I’ve put on one of those classical YouTube Christmas videos, the kind that can play forever. A wooden cabin, a Christmas tree, a sofa with a cat, two large windows. Outside, mountains and softly falling snow. A lake in front of the cabin, and the lights of other cabins around it, as if to say: we’re quietly here too. Beside the TV,…
Sustainability and responsible computing When we talk about sustainability in computing, the conversation often stops at datacenters, power usage effectiveness, and renewable energy sources. Those things matter, of course. But sustainability doesn’t start in a power plant or a cooling system. It starts much earlier, at the moment we design software. Responsible computing also means asking…
(very) late autumn 2025 update Servus from Tara’s offline outpost! We reached -6°C in the past days here and a dash of snow appeared. Nothing compared to the -12°C and the amount of snow I witnessed a few days ago in the Garmisch-Partenkirchen area. Beautiful… but… better experienced from the car! Even the UI of the car wasn’t able to display that temperature properly: the minus sign…
A Love Letter to FreeBSD Dear FreeBSD, I’m still the new person here, learning your ways, stumbling over the occasional quirk, smiling when I find the small touches that make you different. You remind me of what computing felt like before the noise. Before hype cycles and performance theatre. Before every tool needed a plugin system and a logo. You are coherent. You are deliberate. You are the…
On Debian, Rust, and the Unix Spirit An article by Giorgio Rutigliano crossed my feed this week - Debian e Rust - written in Italian, thoughtful and well-argued, describing how Debian is embracing Rust more deeply in its toolchain and base system. You can read it here. Even if you don’t read Italian, the message comes through: from my understanding, Debian wants to bring Rust from the edges…
End of Summer 2025 Updates Servus from Tara’s offline outpost. I wanted to write this post as a mid-summer update… but here we are 🤷‍♀️ The beginning of summer was quite… bumpy. As you might have guessed from a previous post, I am no longer working for the global telecommunications company. That chapter closed in early June, and I decided to give myself space to focus on my other big…
Bright Spot in the Logbook After a couple of months in my hiatus to focus on flying and staying current with my pilot duties, there’s a little thing I want to share. Every so often, someone in aviation says something that stays with me far longer than they might expect. Recently, a senior training captain of a famous airline asked me: “Why don’t you continue your passion and make it your…
Kubernetes on Bare Metal or VMs? Preface Lately, I’ve been asked the same question by an international bank in London, a trading firm in Switzerland, and a startup in Finland: should Kubernetes live on bare metal or inside virtual machines? Each is finding its own way through the jungle of infrastructure modernization, and all have ended up asking versions of the same thing. After repeating these…
From Clouds to Classics: Revisiting IBM i As I enjoy a short hiatus to focus on flying and staying current with my pilot duties, somewhere between jobs and between flight lessons, I’ve found myself drawn back to the kind of engineering that first made me fall in love with computing. Not by plan. Just a slow gravitational pull toward clarity. Lately, that’s meant diving back into IBM i (formerly…
Introduction A couple of months ago, I had an insightful conversation with my former manager, the Cloud Director of a major European telecom company. In that moment, I metaphorically swapped my “employee” hat for my “strategic consultant” hat, the same one I wear when I first engage with clients to discuss their open source strategy. I explained to him the various ways a company might approach…
Life in Rochester, Minnesota Recent events brought my thoughts to Lake Michigan and a period of my life unknown to most. In 2000, I lived in Rochester, Minnesota (USA) for six months. There are good chances that you have yet to hear of this place. It’s a small town in the middle of nowhere known for only two things: the Mayo Clinic and IBM. Needless to say, I was there for an assignment for…
🪐 Life of an in-betweener A patchwork story of culture, belonging, and the search for home They say you can only be from one place. But what if your soul is stamped with too many border crossings, too many accents, too many memories wrapped in mismatched time zones, and too many versions of yourself? I was born in Milan, but my life has stretched across London, Zurich, Dublin, and beyond.…
Planet Papalla Sometimes I say I’m from Planet Papalla. At first, it sounds like a joke. And to be fair, it is a reference, a playful 1960s Italian ad from the show Carosello, where strange, round little creatures (the “Papallesi”) live on a distant planet where joy and invention rule the week. But if you’ve heard me say it, or read it, and wondered why, here’s the truth behind the…
Late Spring 2025 Updates Servus from Tara’s offline outpost! I’ve been cocooning in my offline hideaway through late winter and spring. Not quite as I would have liked, though. I still rely heavily on the big city for medical visits and other appointments. I had hoped some of those would be done by now, but… 🤷 I’d love to share some news. These could have been separate blog…
Useless Projects: Living on My Terms and Finding Meaning By day, I build systems that scale. Private clouds. Thousands of nodes. Infrastructure where machines aren’t named, only counted. Where servers are cattle, and not pets. And I do love it. The science. The engineering. The elegance of large systems, the challenge of getting them right, the precision of seeing every piece click into place. But…
Liberation day, 80th anniversary: Bella Ciao Today, April 25th, we celebrate Liberation Day in Italy. Today marks the 80th anniversary of the victory of the partisans over the nazi-fascists and the end of the fascist regime. Last year, on this very same day, I marched for the first time and wrote that some fundamental rights are slowly being removed from us and that our rights are at risk. Today,…
I may be a bit late, as usual. But the news of Dave Täht’s passing hit me hard. We weren’t close friends, but we did exchange thoughts from time to time, and what stuck with me most was how deeply kind and fundamentally good he was. When I once shared some of my own struggles, Dave responded with empathy and generosity. He talked to me about his music and recommended a few books.
FreeBSD, Workstation and … Home - Part 2 🏡 🌸 (continued from Part 1) In March 2023, I started traveling again, but this time between my houses in Milan and London. It dawned on me that I no longer needed to drag my laptop from one place to the other. I could simply have two computers and use sync services to keep everything in sync (I eventually moved to Nextcloud). So, I took the leap.
FreeBSD, Workstation and … Home - Part 1 🏡 🌸 This article has been on my mind for months, yet it never seemed to fully take shape, until now. The last time I had a dedicated desktop workstation at home was between 1999 and 2001, in a small one-bedroom apartment in Dublin. I worked at IBM back then, and we were already allowed to bring home computers to work. Yes, it was 1999, and remote…
Random Updates from a Late Winter Servus from my offline outpost! I’ve been meaning to share an update for a while. My perfectionist side kept hoping for a well-structured post, but the longer I waited, the less likely it seemed I’d actually publish anything. So, here are some random updates instead. Three Months Off the Grid Today marks three months since I disconnected from “the…
🎄 Santa’s Air: Final Countdown 🎄 The cockpit is alive with soft, familiar hums as I settle into the captain’s seat of our Airbus A320—my sleigh for tonight’s mission. Outside, Milan Linate glimmers in the frosty twilight, the taxiway lights twinkling like Christmas tree ornaments. It’s cold enough to make the snow crunch, but in here, with the APU purring away and the…
From Gitea on Linux to Forgejo on FreeBSD There is no solid reason why I moved away from Gitea. I actually liked Gitea. Let’s say I saw a window of opportunity and made the jump. But let’s rewind and tell you a bit about the background. I embraced Gitea about two years ago, when I decided to host a private git. I couldn’t trust any public site (ex: GitHub or Gitlab) to hold my…
My Dell R710 saga In early Summer 2024, personal circumstances made me decide to leave my apartment in South London. I loved many things about that apartment, including a nice little niche in the storage room beside the FTTH GPON router, where I held some computer equipment. That included an N40L I used to hold a secondary copy of my historical data. The system was running FreeBSD, equipped with…
The day I took over company’s GitHub With the turmoil I’m experiencing in my private life, I failed to realise what was going on in my professional life. I haven’t announced it publicly because I don’t like bragging, but I changed jobs last month. If you are curious to know more details, I’m pretty confident that you can use your favourite search engine. The first…
The Hermit Project - Update I tried being a hermit in the Alps this week as a test for a period of seclusion. Ok, not a real hermit, but I’ve stayed in a small village, and reduced my human interactions to the bare minimum. I am still a city girl; perhaps a cabin alone in the mountains is too much. But compared to being in London, a small apartment in a small village at 1000mt feels like…
Easy way to backup up git a repository (in a pipeline) From previous posts, you probably understood how paranoid I am about having multiple copies of my data in an open format and how much I am concerned about vendor lock-in. Many of us use hosted Git platforms such as GitHub and GitLab. Although they seem very open source friendly, we know how companies are getting down the enshittification route…
The day I felt for 1'000ft This is an unusual post for my blog. But I decided to share this after the incident at Singapore Airlines and my recent car accident. In June 2020, after the first big wave of the pandemic, I wanted to fly again, so I booked a check ride at my Lugano Agno base (ICAO: LSZA) in Ticino, Switzerland. As a pilot, I was allowed to leave my house for professional training and…
Ubiquiti gateway upgrade, QNAP and thoughts I installed my Ubiquiti USG a long time ago in Milan. It initially acted as a gateway with a 30 Mb/sec radio link. Then, when my house was served by FTTH at 1 GB/sec, I immediately upgraded my line. That was a game changer as I could finally backup my QNAP in an S3-like bucket in the cloud. That happened just a few weeks before the Covid pandemic, so…
Firmware-like OS, SLAX and NomadBSD A friend explained that they use Linux on the desktops and -obviously- on the servers at their workplace. But what rang the bell is that their employer periodically automatically re-installed both desktops and servers to avoid potential undetected advanced persistent threats (APT). On the desktop, what is not on their home directory, is wiped. I think that is a…
Liberation Day, aka April 25th April 25th, aka Liberation Day, is a national holiday in Italy. We (Italians) celebrate the victory of the partisans over the nazi-fascists and the end of the fascist regime, which eventually led to the newer democratic Italian republic. But we also remember those who died to bring us the freedom we have today. For the first time, I marched in the April 25th parade…
The Hermit Project - Part 6 In the months since I started the Hermit Project, I learned that other people feel the same about how the Internet has become. Other people are willing to embrace a more minimalistic approach, like the recent talk “NetBSD for the Advanced Minimalist” by Rambius. So far, my project is running on three laptops. Ok, perhaps I should not count the Dell Mini 9.…
The Hermit Project - Part 5 I couldn’t believe I could write a script that ran on the first attempt. note has been almost perfect since the beginning. I’ve just enriched it with some error handling. And I’m so proud that I finally have an end-to-end journal encryption. However, there’s something that upsets me. I said that I didn’t want notification on Hermit, but not…
The Hermit Project - Part 4 Innsbruck is beautiful at Christmas time. The white mountains, the scent of mulled wine (Glühwein) when you go through the Christmas Markets near the city hall. While wandering for the city, I was wondering how it would feel to have a small cabin out in the mountains in that area, perhaps by a lake, a small car just enough to go grocery shopping, and an Internet…
The Hermit Project - Part 3 In the previous episode of “The Hermit Project”, Tara installed FreeBSD on a Dell Inspiron Mini 9 and is thinking about becoming a digital hermit. I always wanted to sound like a TV series, LOL. I immediately loved running the nano editor in a virtual terminal. It was just me and the thoughts I wanted to express. And, despite being over 10 years old and just…
The Hermit Project - Part 2 Back to Part 1, I was thinking about creating a basic command line only Linux, using my GPD Pocket mini-laptop. And use the nano editor as if it were Wordstar. At the end, I need to write text. Plus, I could always use the markdown syntax if I wanted to edit some richer text (like this post, for example). What did they say? Ah, yes … “Life is what happens…
The Hermit Project - Part 1 I promised I would start talking about my Hermit Project. It’s a TL;DR, so I don’t believe that will fit a single post. Plus, I hope to receive questions and give more details about the concepts behind my project. Journaling has been an essential part of my journey. I started journaling on the iPad, writing using an app called Notability. I was okay with…
Is it worth to continue writing? After 9 months, I feel the same way I wrote the article I lost the war also about publishing articles. The social media, YouTube, and even blog posts are full of information about things I work on. Perhaps in different ways, but we tech people know how to work with a given available information and modify it accordingly. What added value would I be able to bring?
FreeBSD (and Linux), Podman containers and Large Receive Offload. I can’t deny I am quite unsatisfied with my current status quo. I’ve been on Linux since 1995, kernel version 0.99p. I’ve advocated Linux since it was even difficult to make a network adapter work. Linux has definitely grown into the foundation of the current Internet and most workloads out there. However, I feel that the community…