$ cat /dev/bitstales

Bit’s Tales

Non è un bug, è una storia. Ingegneria informatica raccontata da chi ha letto le man page al posto tuo.

It’s not a bug, it’s a tale. Computer engineering told by people who read the man pages so you don’t have to.

$ ls -lt ultimi-articoli/latest-posts/

Manila folder stamped NOT THAT CIA in red with three polaroids: a key under a doormat, a sealed bottle, a ship stuck sideways in a canal

The CIA that isn't spying on you: confidentiality, integrity and availability in an ordinary day

A mandatory "CIA training" and one day to work it out: the key under the doormat, the conclave without signal, the queen betrayed by beer barrels, the cough-syrup seal, the plane that ran dry because of pounds and the ship sideways in Suez.

Padel court seen from above, Django on one half and Spring Boot on the other, a ball in flight and a scoreboard with lines of code and startup times

Django and Spring: the same app, twice

The padel club wants online bookings and you write them twice, in Django and in Spring Boot. A Kansas newsroom versus the winter of J2EE, queries written in names, an admin in four lines, the 403 trap and the measured numbers.

Bomb panel with coloured wires labelled if, elif and else, some cut by wire cutters, and a red display showing complexity 18

How to defuse an if: nine tools to straighten out arrow code

You inherit shipping.py: an arrow-shaped function with complexity 18. One afternoon, nine tools (guard clauses, dictionaries, bisect, polymorphism, Null Object, match, EAFP) and the discovery that in Python the branchless trick is slower.

Cover showing an 80-column FORTRAN punched card, punched for the statement Y = A*(2.0+3.0)+B, with a moth resting on its corner

A machine that writes programs: the birth of compilers

Philadelphia, 1952: you write machine code by hand and Grace Hopper wants the computer to write it for you. Then Böhm in Zurich, Glennie in Manchester, Backus's FORTRAN against the "priesthood", a mini-compiler in Python and Ken Thompson's invisible backdoor.

Cover drawn as a slide sorter: twelve colourful slides reading Big Data, Cloud, Blockchain, Metaverse, Generative AI and Agentic, all with the same Excel icon

Same slide, new word: twelve years of buzzwords on the same Excel file

Big Data, Cloud, Blockchain, IoT, Quantum, Metaverse, generative AI and now Agentic: Dr Brambilla's kickoff folder, one slide a year. What they thought these were, what they really are, and three questions to ask before the next word.

Magazine-style cover: OPEN masthead, the Ingenuity helicopter over Martian dunes, cover lines on SQLite, curl, Pokémon Go and NumPy, a FREE as in puppy sticker

Twenty-four hours of open source: from your alarm clock to Mars, without noticing

An ordinary Friday, with a counter in hand: a blessed database flying on the A350, 47 car brands without a single sponsor, fake parks for Pokémon Go, a helicopter on Mars and a black hole made with NumPy. The advantages of open source, one per hour.

Cover drawn as a metro map: permissive line (MIT, BSD, Apache) and copyleft line (LGPL, GPL, AGPL), a suspended source-available line and a YOU ARE HERE pin on MIT

Grandma Pina's ragù and the GPL: the story of free software, and licences explained in the kitchen

You've just finished your first project and GitHub asks you to "Choose a license". Understanding that menu takes a trip: Stallman's printer, a hobby kernel, a blue router, your Mac's bash stuck in 2006. Then the licences, explained as recipes.

Cover shaped like a till receipt: Open Source Market, openssl, log4j, xz, curl, ffmpeg, chalk and debug at 0.00, total zero and a pink NOT PAID stamp

The Freeloader's Handbook: open source as seen by the people who maintain it (for free)

You're one person with an inbox and a library downloaded forty million times a week. On Monday it was chalk and debug's turn. Tonight you get the handbook companies use to exploit your work: seven rules, all field-tested.

Film-still cover: a meeting room with a manager and an engineer, and subtitles translating “real-time” into numbers

Software Engineering

Business ↔ IT: the alignment meeting, with subtitles

“Real-time”, “always available”, “it's just one more field”, “let's add AI”: a one-act play in a meeting room, with the Product Owner interpreting live and technical notes for every scene.

Illustrated cover: cross-section of a canal lock on Milan's Navigli at dusk, three water levels split by mitre gates, boats labelled UI, data model and release 1.0

Software Engineering

Neither waterfall nor endless sprints: the canal-lock method, for whoever has to choose

On Friday evening Brambilla asks you to "go Agile" by next quarter, Gantt chart included. You have a weekend to choose between waterfall and Agile: you read the original texts, use queueing theory to see why the team is tired, and find a middle way on Milan's canals.

Cover: a meeting-room whiteboard with a flowchart of ifs exploding into dozens of branches, sticky notes with the manager's requests and the words “One more if, please”

Software Engineering

One more if, please: a function's life in seven meetings

The business keeps changing its mind, a super-manager with a degree in Potato Chip Science has a vision, and finalPrice() goes from one line to a maze. Autopsy and treatment of if proliferation.

It's not you, it's my catch: an advice column for exceptions

Empty catches, bare excepts, endless retries, lost causes and return inside finally: Dr Finally answers your code's letters. Because catch is not always the answer.

Blueprint-style cover: a dimensioned UML diagram of the Strategy pattern with a title block reading “Gang of Four: the handbook of déjà vu”

Software Engineering

Design patterns: the catalogue entry for engineering's favourite pattern (software not required)

The Gang of Four, Christopher Alexander, the H-bridge and the voltage divider: what a design pattern really is, explained with the GoF template applied to itself.

Y2K-style poster cover: “Skip intro forever”, a puzzle piece (missing plugin) and a giant SKIP INTRO button

Skip intro forever: the rise, glory and slow death of Flash

From vector cartoons for 28.8k modems to the most exploited plugin on the Internet: SWF, ActionScript, JIT spraying, “Thoughts on Flash” and the kill switch that even stopped trains.

Cover: a terminal showing Linus's 1991 comp.os.minix post and the “LINUX is obsolete” thread

Linus vs Tanenbaum: how a hobby that “won't be big and professional” became Linux

MINIX, a 386 bought on instalments, “just a hobby” and the “LINUX is obsolete” flame war: microkernel versus monolithic, and how both sides ended up winning.

Isometric stack of shipping containers labelled chroot, jail, zones, namespaces, cgroups and docker run, with a timeline from 1979 to 2013

From chroot to Docker: a short history of lying to processes

Containers, namespaces, cgroups, OverlayFS: 34 years of well-coordinated lies the kernel tells processes, from 1979's chroot to Docker's whale.