With my recent move to the Italian peninsula I had a very interesting challenge alongside others: I had to learn Italian. I dove into grammar studies, consumed various audiovisual materials and today I find myself in Italy using this wonderful language.
With that, the following conversation came up:
“Which languages do you speak?”
“Speak fluently? Spanish, Portuguese, English and Italian. Catalan I can try a little bit, but I wouldn’t count it”
“Wow, so you fluently speak 4 languages, right?”
“Yes… four…”
And honestly I hadn’t stopped to think about it. Four languages. It is absolutely nothing out of this world, but I didn’t have this realization that it had been a while since I was just bilingual. Portuguese is the language of where I was born, Spanish of where I was raised, Italian of where I am right now and English… well, English was a necessary evil for someone who works in IT and likes to travel. But I want to share my perspective on some aspects of these four languages that don’t necessarily have any philological or scientific basis. These are my two cents on how I see each of these languages.
Recently here in Italy the case of the “Famiglia nel Bosco” or Family in the Woods made headlines. It was a family living in radical isolation in the Abruzzo region. The English father and Australian mother decided together with their children, an 8-year-old girl and a pair of 6-year-old twins, to live off-grid in a totally isolated house.
They adopted so-called neo-ruralism. They lived without basic services like electricity, running water or conventional heating and maintained almost total social and technological isolation.
While speaking with a friend, I heard one of the most typical complaints from millennials regarding entertainment objects. She said: “I feel a pang of guilt, because I bought this thing and I should use it more.” For example, having a console and feeling that we don’t play it often enough. Having a collection of graphic novels and feeling that we have to read everything, that money was spent on something.
You have probably walked past a brutalist building without knowing the style’s name. They are those raw concrete constructions, unplastered, where you can see the marks of the molds used in casting. Structure exposed. Piping sticking out. For a long time, computers were like this.
In the 80s, when you turned on a microcomputer (MSX, Apple II, or my personal favorite, the TK90x/ZX Spectrum), there was no desktop. There were no folder icons simulating an office. There was no metaphor at all. What appeared was a blinking cursor, waiting. The machine looked at you and asked: “What’s the plan for today, boss?”
I need to say something that might sound counterintuitive. As a Barcelona supporter, I owe a debt of gratitude to Manchester United.
Not because of any friendly rivalry or mutual respect between European giants. No. I am grateful because the catastrophic decline of Manchester United serves as the perfect control group in the grand experiment of modern football. They are the living, breathing proof that money cannot buy greatness.
While Barcelona was drowning in a billion euros of debt, losing the greatest player in history, and selling off pieces of its own future just to keep the lights on, Manchester United was spending. And spending. And spending some more. The result? We are back competing for La Liga titles and scaring teams in the Champions League. They are fighting for fourth place in England and praying Europa League qualification counts as progress.
My wife and I have a new Friday ritual. We sit down to watch Pluribus. Phones off. Lights dimmed. No second screen.
In 2025, this is an act of rebellion.
The Problem
Modern television is terrified of you. It assumes you have the attention span of a caffeinated goldfish. Netflix front-loads every plot point in the first five minutes. Cliffhangers hit every seven minutes. The editing is so frenetic the show itself seems to be having a panic attack.
I have been spending a considerable amount of time aboard the original USS Enterprise lately. While it is easy to get charmed by Captain Kirk’s chaotic charisma or Spock’s cold logic, the truth needs to be said. The real genius of that ship does not wear gold or blue. He wears red and has a questionable Scottish accent.
I am talking about Montgomery “Scotty” Scott.
Many look at the Chief Engineer and see comic relief or a man who enjoys complaining that “the engines cannot take it” a little too much. They are wrong. Scotty is the only adult in the room. He is the greatest practitioner of the lost art of Expectation Management.
Have you seen the new Santiago Bernabeu?. It is a technological marvel. It has a retractable pitch that hides in a cave. It has a 360-degree screen that makes Las Vegas look subtle. It generates money with the efficiency of a Swiss bank.
It is also dead.
Marc Augé coined the term “Non-Place” to describe spaces of transience. Airports. Supermarkets. Hotel chains. Places where human relations are suspended and you are defined solely by your credit card limit.
I can already hear the Go purists sharpening their pitchforks. “Use the standard library,” they chant. “Frameworks are anti-pattern,” they scream.
I don’t care.
I am not using Fiber because I am lazy. I am not using it because it looks like Express.js. I am using it because I have a pathological addiction to speed, and net/http, bless its safe, compatible heart, is simply too polite for the violence I want to inflict on my CPU.
I need to get something off my chest. Something that has been festering in my soul since the first time I joined a project mid-development and asked the fateful question: “Where is the API documentation?”
The answer, invariably, was one of the following:
“Check the Postman collection.” (Translation: a graveyard of 200 requests, half of which are outdated, named things like GET users FINAL v2 (copy))
“Just look at the code.” (Translation: reverse-engineer our spaghetti and good luck)
“We’ll document it later.” (Translation: we will never document it)
But let’s assume, for the sake of my sanity, that the initial reports are true. Let’s assume that someone, somewhere in the JLR hierarchy, finally looked at the smoking crater where Jaguar’s brand identity used to be and said: “Maybe we should do something about this.”
I’m going to start this post differently. No elaborate metaphors, no Star Trek analogies, no code. Just a simple question that has been eating away at my brain since I moved to Europe:
Why the hell do I need an American account to download my own government’s application?
Let me give you some context. I live in Italy. I pay taxes in Italy. I have an Italian fiscal code. And when I need to access the official Italian government app (or Post Office app) to check my tax situation, what do I do? I open the Google Play Store, an American store, with my data stored on American servers, subject to American legislation, to download an application from a European country’s government.
I’ll start this post with a confession that might earn me some enemies: I hate JSON.
It’s not an irrational hate, the kind that appears out of nowhere. It’s a hate built, brick by brick, over years of debugging malformed payloads, fields that should have been numbers but arrived as strings, and that classic null where you expected an empty array. JSON is the digital equivalent of a phone conversation with your grandmother: you think you understood what she said, but when you get there, the carrot cake didn’t have that expected chocolate frosting (Brazilians will understand).
If you have read my previous posts about building a Home Server via CLI, you know exactly how I feel about Microsoft’s operating system. To me, using Windows for work or development is a waste of performance, privacy, and sanity. It consumes RAM just to exist, sends telemetry data about your mouse movements to Redmond, and restarts without your permission to install an update that changes the icon of the calculator.
