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Sun, 18 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The last 4 months were a huge pile of shit for me.

My father passed away after about three months with aggressive cancer. I still haven’t fully processed it because I’m drowning in Italian bureaucracy that keeps me occupied (lucky me, huh?). But still, I miss him every fucking moment, but especially when I watch Inter matches, which we used to comment on in real time via chat. Fuck cancer.

On top of that, my girlfriend went through a severe burnout, and I dealt with some health issues, so I guess it makes sense that I haven’t updated the blog for a while.

On the other hand, I’ve developed some sane coping mechanisms that kept me alive and functioning:

I’ve become a gym rat. If I could tell my past self this, he’d probably spit in my eyes. But hey, I love training! Cardio, functional, calisthenics. They make me feel better than I’ve ever felt.
I went to a few tech conferences: All of them were interesting, especially the security-focused ones. I learned a lot, took notes on topics I’d like to learn and try, and kept thinking about submitting a talk for one of those conferences.

On the technical side for you nerds, I ditched the write.as platform and spawned an instance on Hetzner. I choose Hugo with the Hugo blog awesome theme: it works, it’s blazing fast and I like it.

Oh, I should also mention some work-related news here, but I’ll cover it in the next post.

Cloud Native Days Italy 2026

Tue, 26 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Cloud Native Days Italy 2026

Last week I was in Bologna (hands down my favorite Italian city) for Cloud Native Days Italy 2026, a two-day conference centered around cloud native and everything that revolves around it.

The conference followed a very precise schedule: keynotes, talks, and lightning talks (many of which were sponsored) interspersed with coffee breaks and lunch.

The venue

Once again this year, the conference took place at the Savoia Hotel Regency congress center, and I can’t help but appreciate it. The environment is spacious and bright on the inside, and outside you can relax by the pool or surrounded by greenery. The lunch and coffee breaks were also wonderful. We are in Bologna after all, aren’t we?

AKA gadget gathering!

Jokes aside, it was an excellent opportunity for networking and getting to know products and initiatives from companies and communities. Without going into detail about all the conversations I had, I just want to mention the folks from https://www.greensoftwareitalia.org because I believe their work is essential at a time like this.

In any case, the t-shirts, socks, bottle openers, keychains, hat, and lego sets were highly appreciated. :p

The talks

This is the list of talks I attended, along with a few comments:

Day 1

Keynote: The hidden cognitive cost of cloud-native sprawl: making (and surviving) hundreds of choices a day an interesting topic of discussion, which I am not entirely a stranger to (having a behavioral scientist by my side), but which was interesting to analyze in relation to my world. An honorable mention for including links and references for every post/video/book.
Intro to Calico Observability: a sponsored talk dedicated to Whisker, a network observability tool integrated into Calico (even in the open-source version!).
API-First IDPs on Kubernetes: Unifying APIs, Workloads & Developer Experience: a talk about OpenChoreo, an IDP platform. The concept of IDP wasn’t completely clear to me, but the problem it solves is quite common and relatable. Definitely something I would like to try introducing to my team as well.
What Image-Based Systems Taught Us About Linux Distributions: Lessons From Kairos and Why We Built Hadron: Hadron is an immutable operating system built from scratch. As a nerd passionate about the topic, I was curious to understand the different approach adopted by the devs compared to, for instance, bootc.
Osservabilità by Design con OTel Weaver: Weaver was defined by the speaker as “IaC for observability”, a beautiful definition.
The Truth About GPU Sharing in Multi-Tenant Kubernetes: an introduction to how GPUs are “shared” on k8s.
Oops-Driven Development: a funny lightning talk about the best practices to adopt in order to prevent the classic “oops” moments experienced by every (System/DevOps/Platform/Site Reliability) Engineer.
SB💣💣M: Making SBOMs play together: the talk illustrates the research work and the related tool developed to connect different tools that produce SBOMs and the results of their analyses, demonstrating once again the need for some sort of standardization from vendors.
Booting into Kubernetes with an Immutable OS: another interesting talk about immutable operating systems, analyzing the reasons behind their creation and what kind of use case they aim to solve, especially in a world as standardized as that of k8s.

Day 2

Keynote: Open Source at CERN: how a research institution like CERN develops and releases open-source software. Personally, I was very happy that OpenStack was mentioned not just as the foundation of their infrastructure but as a flagship product, with a few slides showing the massive usage it sees internally.
Applying CI/CD Patterns to Bootc Containers: an interesting talk by a colleague about integrating bootc into CI/CD pipelines with some practical examples.
GitOps at Scale: Why Your Hub-and-Spoke Architecture is a Security Risk: one of the talks I enjoyed the most, featuring a comparison of various architectural approaches with their pros and cons.
Open Source made in Italy: l’evoluzione cloud-native di ArubaCloud: in this lightning talk I learned how ArubaCloud has “transformed” from a classic hosting provider into something cloud-native friendly, offering SDKs, CLI tools, and a Terraform provider.
What Should a Cloud-Native OS Look Like? Rethinking the Foundation of Modern Platforms: yet another talk dedicated to immutable OSs, illustrating why their model works in a cloud-native environment, how hyperscalers are behaving, and why it is important to define an open standard.
Scraping logs on legacy microservices: an adventure in the land of YAML descriptors: logs, legacy microservices, YAML, logging operators -> the recipe for an interesting and ever-timely talk.
Building, sharing, running and governing AI Agents: an AI-themed lightning talk from Docker. The speaker showed a demo of products related to the topic: Docker Sandboxes, Gordon, AI governance.
From Cloud Native to Agentic Applications: Workflows & Observability: another talk I highly appreciated because it showed how to monitor the impact and costs of an “agentic” application developed with Dapr Workflow.
Platform Engineering and AI Agents: Spec-Driven development for IaC: the speaker showed a demo of IaC development using a “spec-driven development” approach, particularly emphasizing potential security issues and how to mitigate them.

Takeaways

The conference talks were generally of excellent quality, and I am very glad that AI-themed talks did not monopolize the entire event, leaving room for topics that are, IMO, more interesting. The organizers did a great job from every perspective, and I was truly happy to have participated. I met colleagues and former colleagues, chatted about interesting topics, ate well, and I even won a CNCF voucher because I left the most feedback on the talks! :D

If I had to nitpick, I would say I’d like to see a lot more care taken to avoid completely AI-generated slides (sigh) and more effort to engage the community through open standards (the fediverse) rather than relying on the usual commercial social networks or messaging systems with questionable security standards. But that’s another story.

See you on May 20, 2027, for the next edition!

Another fresh start

Wed, 04 Jun 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Another fresh start

I decided to start blogging again while I was having lunch on the last day of a conference ¹ I attended. I was thrilled by almost everything I saw and heard there, so I felt the urge to start writing about it.

I’ve lost faith in social networks long time ago and the only social network I’m still in doesn’t deserve any structured thought because of its enshittification.

I spent several days thinking about where and how to start blogging again; I excluded Medium because of their paywall, I haven’t considered not even for a second Substack and/or any other walled garden that forces users to subscribe, pay, or download an app to read a bunch of characters that could be easily read on a toaster ² .

And above all: none of those solutions are free software which is a huge nope for me.

I spent a lot of time fighting against Wordpress so I gave up years ago, Ghost seems oriented to professional writers and GitHub pages, well, thanks but no thanks.

I’ve heard about WriteFreely on the fediverse, when I still had a presence there, but since I didn’t want to selfhost or register an account on an instance that might disappear the next day, i refused to consider it.

And here comes write.as (which, my fault, I never considered despite they are the WriteFreely developers!) that will host my bad written thoughts if I will be consistent.

Kudos to the team!

Pycon IT, I’ll talk about it. ↩︎
IYKYK, and in that case, congratulations! You’re old! ↩︎

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Cloud Native Days Italy 2026

Cloud Native Days Italy 2026

The venue

Sponsor and community area

The talks

Day 1

Day 2

Takeaways

Another fresh start

Another fresh start