Marco Dalla Stella

Week 28/26

Unknown — Sun, 12 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

So, what happened since May? Not much really, let's recap the interesting bits (if any).</p>

Work</h2>
I juggled between different projects, mostly internal—focusing on system integrations, reports, dashboards/portals, and MCP servers for our internal AI.</p>
The merge between the two companies is going ok, but there's a lot of room for improvement in cooperation and communication: sometimes it's hard to tell who is doing what and why, so there's always some level of uncertainty.</p>
There's an Italian proverb that goes: "A dog with two owners dies of hunger.". See also: Diffusion of responsibility</a>.</p>

Personal</h2>
Summer isn't the best time of the year for anxious people: the heat mimics the symptoms of anxiety quite well: shortness of breath, sweating, dizziness, and palpitations.</p>
It's easy for a hypervigilant amygdala to get fooled and start a "fight-or-flight" response.</p>
But don't worry, I have my countermeasures, and it's going fine. Also, there is no shame if sometimes I can't stand a situation; it's my right.</p>
I used to think I couldn't afford a single failure, that would become another crack in an already cracked pot, but it's not like that.</p>
I should be more forgiving of myself and love myself a little more.</p>
Moving on to something more interesting, a couple of months ago I installed a Hermes</a> instance on my servers.</p>
It's the most useful thing involving AI that I've ever used; I'm probably going to write a post about it.</p>
Currently, I'm reading "A History of Western Philosophy</a>" for the second time: even if it's inaccurate and opinionated, I personally feel a strong connection with the way Russell thinks.</p>
Outside of work, I don't sit in front of a computer too much these days. I prefer reading, playing "No Man's Sky", playing the guitar, or experimenting with Strudel</a>.</p>

Week 19/26

Unknown — Sun, 10 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

It's been a while since the last post. Will there be a lot of updates? Not really.</p>

A lot happened, but most of it is not very interesting to write about. Or maybe it is, but I’m not that good to make it sound interesting.</p>

Work</h2>
Since January, I'm an employee again at an IT company. In December I left my previous company after almost 10 years. Was it a hard decision? Yes. Was it worth it? Absolutely. It was becoming a toxic relationship: no one was happy.</p>
The new company is going through a merger with another company of the same size, so a big part of my daily work is about data integration.</p>
And by data integration I mean the usual wonderful mix of ERP, CRM, monitoring systems, ticketing systems, "temporary" solutions that became production years ago, the usual stuff you'll find in a mid-sized company... but twice the fun.</p>
But you know what? I have colleagues now, real people around me all day. Most of them are also nice, not bad at all to have someone to talk to on coffee breaks.</p>
At the moment I'm working with Python, but I didn't give up on functional programming yet. We'll see.</p>

Personal</h2>
I've been tired.</p>
Anxiety came back a bit harder around the end of February or the beginning of March. Agoraphobia too, which is the worst part.</p>
There are good periods and bad periods. This is not one of the best ones.</p>
I’m trying to look at it more seriously this time. Anxiety is not always just fear of something specific. Sometimes it’s a very efficient avoidance system. It keeps you busy with symptoms, so you don’t have to look too closely at what’s underneath.</p>
Fear of not being good enough. Fear of disappointing people. Fear of losing stability.</p>
Fear of ending up again in a place I already visited between 2002 and 2007, and I don’t really want to visit again.</p>
I’m doing a more structured cognitive-behavioral therapy</a>. It’s not magic, and it’s not fun, but it helps... let’s call it a work in progress.</p>
So? I work. I get tired. I try to manage anxiety. I do some gardening. I think about programming languages more than I actually use them in my free time.</p>
Not very exciting, I know.</p>

Up to week 43

Unknown — Sun, 02 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Personal</h2>
In the last weeks there were some ups and downs, I had to deal with some anxiety, but it has been much better than week 39</a>. The change of season and the switch from DST to Standard Time always takes a toll on my mental health.</p>
That said, I'm not a hermit. I'm still enjoying going out with my girlfriend and friends. My agoraphobia kicks in only when I'm alone.</p>
In the past weeks, in random order:</p>

Conegliano & The Winged Lion</h3>
We visited some friends in Conegliano</a> (one of the birthplaces of Prosecco</a> wine), we visited the "Winged Lion" made by Marco Martalar. Martalar's sculptures are made with the wood of the fallen trees caused by the Storm Vaia</a> in 2018</a>. There are a few of these sculptures. You can see them here</a>.</p>

Martalar's Lion</figcaption> </figure>
After a short hike, we had lunch together at Andreetta</a> restaurant: fine wines and delicious food.</p>
Probably the next sculpture we are going to visit will be the "Winged Dragon" in Lavarone</a>.</p>
Halloween</h3>
The last time I did something fun on Halloween night was in 2010. That night, one of the main rivers in Vicenza (my hometown), flooded our district, Borgo San Pietro</a>. We went to a treasure hunt that night, dressed up as monsters. The next day we woke up with 30cm of brown water inside the house. By the end of that morning the water rose to about 1m, so we fled and got hospitality from family members and friends. We moved back in our home a year after.</p>

2010 flood</figcaption> </figure>
So no, I don't really like Halloween, and for years after I couldn't enjoy the sound of the rain.</p>
This year we celebrated Halloween after 15 years, I dressed as a vampire (quite easy), and my gf as a voodoo queen. We met with some friends at a local club and "enjoyed" a cover band of Nightwish and Epica (not really my music genre). I was tense at the beginning, but after a couple of Americano</a> I started to enjoy the evening.</p>

Me and my friend Carmine on the left, my gf on the right</figcaption> </figure>
Code</h2>
LLM</h3>
I discovered OpenRouter</a> and cancelled my OpenAI plan. OpenRouter allows to get access to multiple LLM models thanks to a unified API and it also automatically routes your prompts to the "best" model based on cost, latency and availability. (I'm not related with OpenRouter in any way, I just think it's a wonderful service).</p>
Thanks to OpenRouter I managed to:</p>

Deploy an instance of OpenWebUI</a>, to have a "personal" Chat and RAG experience, choosing between 500+ models.</li>
Implement a couple of useful n8n</a> workflows, such as transforming documents, photos, or vocal memos directly to org-mode, ready to be copied and pasted through a Telegram bot.</li>
Start to use Claude Code cli tool. Thanks to Claude Code Router</a> (ccr), I can use OpenRouter models instead of Anthropic models (they're not cheap). At the moment I'm really enjoying GLM 4.6</a> from Z.ai</a> for coding and Gemini 2.5 Flash for quick tasks.</li>
I also added claude-code.el</a> by Steve Molitor to my Emacs configuration</a>. It's nice to have an AI assistant inside the editor. I don't do any vibe-coding sessions, but it's helpful for tedious tasks. I tried ECA and Aider before, but I wasn't completely satisfied with the integrations and the configuration. I will keep a look at ECA, anyway, in case Claude Code will stop working with ccr.</li> </ul>
Go</h3>
After giving up</a> with Rust, I took a look at Zig, but I don't think the ecosystem is mature yet for production and, like Rust, it's too low level for my needs.</p>
Instead, I started to study Go. I'm still not a fan of imperative programming, but I find Go better than Python TBH. First of all, Go can be compiled to a single portable binary: this is useful with docker images, where with Python I need to produce huge images with all the project dependencies. Go does not need external libraries or funny tricks for async or concurrency, and does not have Python GIL limitations. Also, thanks to Clojure core.async, I'm already familiar with the CSP model.</p>
Notable links</h2>

Anthropic: A small number of samples can poison LLMs of any size</a></li>
E.W.Dijkstra Archive: Home page</a></li>
Big Tech Is Faking Revenue - YouTube</a></li> </ul>

Week 39

Unknown — Sun, 28 Sep 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Personal</h2>
This was a hard week for my anxiety, probably due to the sudden change of season (the temperature dropped by 10 degrees, I think), and some personal issues.</p>
How this affect my daily life? I'm agoraphobic, so I have huge anxiety when I travel alone, even on short distances. That's very annoying, there are good times and bad times: fortunately, over the past decade, the bad times have become increasingly rare, I will survive this as well.</p>

Code</h2>
I didn't code much outside daily work this week, due to the personal stuff aforementioned.</p>
I experimented a bit with SHAP analysis</a> (using this</a> library) to explain the impact of the parameters on a multi-label classification ML model.</p>
Other than this, I played a bit with TidalCycles</a>, Overtone</a>, and SuperCollider</a> for music and sound design.</p>

Notable links</h2>

Japan's most sacred Shinto shrine is rebuilt again and again | AP News</a></li>
Practical guide to SHAP analysis: Explaining supervised machine learning model predictions</a></li>
Soufflé | Soufflé • A Datalog Synthesis Tool for Static Analysis</a></li> </ul>

Week 38

Unknown — Sun, 21 Sep 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Personal</h2>
Another boring week, the weather in Italy has been nice but between work and personal issues I didn't have time to enjoy it. I did some gardening on the weekend, so it was "work" plus "fun".</p>
I'm still going on with the "Gone" series: after "Hunger", I started with "Plague". I have to admit that, against my predictions, the series gets darker and more mature as it goes. As someone said "What would happen if Stephen King wrote Lord of the Flies?"</p>
I haven't mentioned yet that I own a Steam Deck. I used to own a PS4 and a PS5, and the only games I played were Destiny</a> and Destiny 2</a>, so quite a casual gamer. Some COD</a> and Warframe</a> as well.</p>
Then one day I thought I was wasting my time, and time is precious: I sold the PS5 and bought a Steam Deck. Mostly because:</p>

It's a handheld device; I can play everywhere inside and outside the house.</li>
It has a battery, which naturally limits my playtime.</li>
It runs Arch Linux 😄</li> </ul>
These days I mostly play another great love of mine, Titanfall 2</a>. However, I think I'm going to start playing something cozier and more immersive, like Cult of the Lamb</a> or No Man's Sky</a>.</p>
Code</h2>
Last week was full of supply-chain attacks on NPM, and the situation is quite scary. I don't know all the details, but something certainly needs to change. The constant updates and "new features," the lack of code verification, and the complete absence of big companies—who make billions relying on plenty of open source code without bothering to contribute—are all concerning. We programmers, as well, have responsibilities when we publish our code.</p>
I don't know, the Gordian knot here is: how can we produce high-quality code and let people enjoy it freely without being paid?</p>
Who are these wonderful people who "sacrifice" themselves to provide free code for us, asking for nothing in return, nor seeking help or support?</p>
Is this sustainable in the long run? I think we will get an answer soon.</p>
Notable links</h2>

Practical guide to SHAP analysis: Explaining supervised machine learning model predictions in drug development - PMC</a></li>
Lisp in 2025: A Practical Guide to the One True Programming Language</a></li>
Why We Spiral - by Gregory M. Walton - Behavioral Scientist</a></li>
CubeSats are fascinating learning tools for space | Jeff Geerling</a></li> </ul>

Week 37

Unknown — Sun, 14 Sep 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Personal life</h2>
Another boring week. I finished "Hunger" and started "Lies". Like the other two books, it's not that deep, but I started to care for a couple of characters, so I'm curious to see how the book goes. This third book is also interesting also because "religion" is the main theme: different views on faith fighting each other… I've always been fascinated with the concept, even if my "rational" mind refuses any sort of faith. I'm still resonate with Jiddu Krishnamurti</a> when he said:</p>

I maintain that truth is a pathless land, and you cannot approach it by any path whatsoever, by any religion, by any sect. That is my point of view, and I adhere to that absolutely and unconditionally. Truth, being limitless, unconditioned, unapproachable by any path whatsoever, cannot be organized; nor should any organization be formed to lead or coerce people along a particular path. …This is no magnificent deed, because I do not want followers, and I mean this. The moment you follow someone you cease to follow Truth.</p> </blockquote>
Truth is a process, not a goal.</p>
Code</h2>
Clojure still amazes me, even after more than ten years: the community continues to produce wonderful stuff… It's inspirational.</p>
I gave up on Rust; I have no use at the moment for low-level code. And even if I need some, I think I'll take a look at Zig</a>.</p>
I'd like to try again with music frameworks like TidalCycle</a> or Overtone</a>.</p>
I've been following the Helix editor</a> for a while now; I like the Kakoune</a> modal editing philosophy, and I'm really excited by Helix plugin system based on Steel</a> (a Scheme interpreter written in Rust). There are some people against this decision, and I expressed myself in the discussion on Github:</p>

Using Lisp dialect as a language of choice for plugin system is a bad decisio…</a></li> </ul>
Notable links of the week</h2>

Open source means surrendering your monopoly over commercial exploitation</a></li>
GitHub - edent/SuperTinyIcons: Under 1KB each! Super Tiny Icons are miniscule…</a></li>
Seedship</a> (Game)</li>
Clojure's Solutions to the Expression Problem - InfoQ</a></li> </ul>

Week 35 and 36

Unknown — Sun, 07 Sep 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Personal life</h2>
The last couple of weeks have been pretty boring; not much has happened. I'm starting to get a bit fed up with some unresolved matters.</p>
I finished "Gone" and, since I don't have a real alternative, I started "Hunger" from the same series. It's easy to read but boring—perfect for bedtime.</p>
I'm doing more gardening; I enjoy doing something with my hands other than pressing keys on a keyboard. It makes me feel real.</p>

Code</h2>
In my free time, I'm working on an RSS-to-Mastodon project with Babashka</a> to automatically toot my posts to Functional Cafe</a>.</p>
I'm searching for an alternative to Vue to use with the Python project I'm working on. HTMX</a> and Datastar</a> sound promising, but the fact that you have to send HTML over WebSockets or Server-Sent Events (SSE) feels off to me… Applications should send and receive data, not fragments of HTML (which is data, I know).</p>
I've always been told to decouple software parts to achieve maximum flexibility.</p>
I probably don't yet understand which kinds of applications these frameworks are best suited for.</p>

Notable links of the week</h2>

ECA - Editor Code Assistant</a></li>
Some thoughts on LLMs and Software Development</a> - Martin Fowler</li>
Measuring the Impact of Early-2025 AI on Experienced Open-Source Developer Productivity</a></li> </ul>

Week 34

Unknown — Sun, 24 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Personal life</h2>
I turned 44 on Sunday 24, so now I'm officially older than my grandfather. It's funny thinking that me and my father are older than he was. He lived through the '40s to the '70s, saw a world war and the reconstruction of a nation… He probably lived more lives in his 43 years on this earth that I'll ever live.</p>
Time is relative for sure. If you have a PhD in physics, sorry for the joke.</p>
The "Gone" book I'm reading is not that bad, but it's reeealllyy teenager material: I'm going to finish this one, but I'm not going on with the series: I don't think is going to grow and get more mature alongside the reader like Harry Potter books.</p>
I bought myself a pair of Moondrop Space Travel 2</a>: they sound really good for their low price.</p>

Code</h2>
It was a quiet week, a lot of people were still on holiday leaves. Still working on a Python/Vue project and man, it really hurts. I don't get why Python is so popular: the syntax is verbose, it's slow as hell, concurrency is a joke… and yet is the number one language for AI… go figure. On the other hand, Vue is one of the worst framework I have ever worked with: it's hard to figure out who changed a ref</a>, computed</a> hides its reactive dependencies, errors in the browser console are hard to understand. I don't like it at all.</p>
I keep going on with my Rust studies, even if I find quite hard to understand why programming should be so hard. I mean, it's obviously hard to solve a complex problem by itself, why should I have also to struggle against the language?</p>
I also worked a bit on another Babashka script for waybar</a> widgets, a tailscale simple monitor. I'm going to publish a git repo with all these scripts on week 35.</p>

Notable links of the week</h2>

Weaponizing image scaling against production AI systems -The Trail of Bits Blog</a></li>
Why LLM predictions are dangerous for Finance? - DEV Community</a></li>
What are OKLCH colors?</a></li> </ul>

Week 33

Unknown — Sun, 17 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Personal life</h2>
Nothing much is going on. The weather has been quite hot here in northern Italy, so I spent most of my time at home. Luckily, the temperature in the countryside drops in the evening, so we could sleep without air conditioning.</p>
We are having some trouble catching a mole that is destroying our garden. I'm trying some non-lethal methods, but I'm afraid the approach is not going to be effective.</p>
Did you know I love anime? Not that I talk a lot about it. Anyway, I saw an interesting series this week, different from my usual kind: Ping Pong the Animation</a>. I'm also looking forward to seeing the last Demon Slayer</a> movie in September.</p>
I finished reading Recursion: not the best sci-fi thriller I've ever read, but still enjoyable. I'm now reading the first book of the Gone</a> series. I know, it's a teenager book series, but I usually read to escape reality and not to find the "Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything"™.</p>

Work</h2>
I should rename this section "Code". Not a lot of interesting stuff on this side. Like last week, I fixed some bugs on a customer project, and developed a couple of new features.</p>
I'm still tweaking my Niri setup. I wrote a couple of Babashka</a> scripts to switch workspaces and manage their position when I plug my laptop into different monitor configurations, you can find them here</a>.</p>
Talking about Babashka, I'm also writing a small script to publish posts from my RSS feed to Mastodon automagically, I'll put it somewhere public as soon as it's ready.</p>
I'm slowly progressing with my Rust journey. It's difficult after almost ten years of Clojure to switch back to a strongly typed imperative language… Also, a lot of interesting languages compete with Rust, like Zig and Nim.</p>
I made some changes to this site as well: I changed from "articles" to "posts", 'cause "articles" sounds a little pompous. I'm also adapting the website structure to microformats</a>, to make it compatible with IndieWeb Specifications</a>. The next big thing will be implementing comments (Mastodon? Don't know yet).</p>

Notable links of the week</h2>

trane</a> - Music Making DSL & Environment in Janet via Wasm (Love Janet!)</li>
Become So Disciplined People Call You Crazy (Miyamoto Musashi) - YouTube</a></li>
The origin of complexity. Writing software is hard.</a></li>
xvw.lol - Why I chose OCaml as my primary language</a> (OCaml always fascinated me)</li> </ul>

Week 32

Unknown — Sun, 10 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Personal life</h2>
The week went smoothly, not a lot to say. I finished reading The Martian</a>: nice book for an engineer (which I'm not), it reminds me of Robinson Crusoe. I'm now reading Recursion</a>, quite tripping.</p>

Work</h2>
August is a quiet and dead month. I'm spending my time maintaining minor software bugs, doing some research on my favorite language (Clojure), and I started learning Rust. I found this course from Google (Comprehensive Rust</a>) and I'm going through it. Why not the official Rust Book</a>? I have this complex, I'm unable to conform and I feel the need to take the "road less traveled".</p>

Notable links of the week:</h2>

bits all the way down: Clojure and D-Bus</a></li>
Deploying ML models in Clojure · Jan Wedekind</a></li>
Neuroscience Says Emotionally Intelligent People Take 3 Steps to Reduce Stress and Boost Confidence, Skill, and Performance</a></li> </ul>

Week 31

Unknown — Sun, 03 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Personal life</h2>
I skipped last week, since I was on holiday. The weather was not nice to us, it rained three out of five days, but we had time to relax, eat good food, drink good wine (Friulano rules!), and spend more time with our dogs, without thinking too much about the troubles of our daily lives.</p>

Work</h2>
I'm still thinking about my future. I'm digging into different directions:</p>

Still toying with ML</h3>
I'm continuing my studies on ML, the only downside is having to deal with Python. I know there are a lot of different possibilities out there: Noj</a> for Clojure, JuliaML</a> for Julia, deeplearning4j</a> for Java…</p>
I first need to wrap my head around the different ML possibilities (data massaging, techniques, algorithms…) and then I'll try to migrate some of my experiments to other languages.</p>

Vibecoding</h3>
I don't exactly 'vibecode', but in the last couple of months I've used LLM (Gemini and Claude) as a rubber duck. I never completely trust the output, so I always check the sources if possible, and keep reading the documentation to understand what the suggested code does. Although LLMs can seem all-knowing, their knowledge is often outdated, and they get confused easily in a long and complex chat.</p>
Notable links of the week:</h3>

Age Verification Doesn’t Need to Be a Privacy Footgun - Dhole Moments</a></li>
The Hidden Lessons in a re-frame App</a></li>
It's time for modern CSS to kill the SPA - Jono Alderson</a></li>
LLM Embeddings Explained: A Visual and Intuitive Guide - a Hugging Face Space by hesamation</a></li> </ul>

Week 29

Unknown — Sun, 20 Jul 2025 00:00:00 +0000

This is a summary of week 29, 2025:</p>

This week went quite smoothly, but not really productive, with some hiccups here and there. Next week I'll be on holiday, I hope to free my mind for a few days.</p>

No news, good news?</h2>
So, I don't have a lot to say about this week.</p>
I dug a little deeper in k8s. I had to deal with it sometimes in the past, but there were always one or two persons on the team dedicated to the infrastructure. For this client, there is only one person, and he's not constantly on the project, so I have to figure out some stuff for myself. Still, I don't understand the reason for using k8s for a 200-300 users at max.</p>

Back to Niri</h2>
The biggest news is that I decided to give Niri</a> another try this week, since I had a little free time. My current work setup is:</p>

Hardware</strong>: Thinkpad T14s G3, two 27" monitors, Cable Matters dock</li>
Arch Linux (btw®), with LUKS and Btrfs, and rEFInd</a></li>
Ly</a> as display manager</li>
Niri as window manager, rofi</a> as launcher, and waybar</a> as topbar. I'd really like to use eww</a>, let's see when I get further free time</li>
Holy Emacs is my main editor, kitty</a> as terminal emulator</li> </ul>
I'm going to use this configuration for a while, take notes and report back on its usability.</p>

Week 28

Unknown — Sun, 13 Jul 2025 00:00:00 +0000

This is a summary of week 28, 2025:</p>
This week was quite challenging mentally. I'm looking forward to my trip to Fagagna</a> with my partner and my dogs in a couple of weeks. Nice places, nice food, and nice company: I can't ask for more.</p>
JavaScript and Vue.js</h2>
I have to use Vue.js</a> on one of my client's projects. I don't like it: it's messy, verbose, and counterintuitive. I don't know why anyone wants to work with something like this. I feel much better with an event-driven framework like re-frame</a>.</p>
The same goes for JavaScript as a language.</p>
I recently watched and enjoyed David Nolen's talk ClojureScript from First Principles</a>, and he makes a lot of good points about the current state of JS. It was interesting to learn why ClojureScript was based on the Google Closure Compiler</a> and how powerful it is out of the box (no shadow-cljs needed).</p>
Some food for thought:</p>

Even if there are better JS tools nowadays, web pages aren't faster or lighter.</li>
If the modern JS story is so great, why is there an overall sense of declining software quality?</li>
7MB of transpiled ClojureScript compiles to 3KB of JavaScript code (in 1.5 seconds).</li> </ul>
Python, ML, and Colorimetry</h2>
In my spare time, I'm working on a small project to see if it's possible to train a neural network to return the spectrophotometric curve, given its La*b</strong></a> values. I have a moderately sized dataset (300k+) to refine to make it truly useful. I'm using TensorFlow</a>, pandas</a>, scikit-learn</a>, and the Colour</a> library. As soon as I get good results, I'll probably write an post.</p>
Moving from GitHub</h2>
I'm cleaning up and moving my private repositories from GitHub to a self-hosted instance of Gitea. It's probably a bit too late to escape Copilot, but it's never too late to keep AI away from my personal code.</p>
Desktop environment</h2>
In the last few months, I moved from Gnome to KDE, and back to Gnome.</p>
KDE was one of my first desktop environments (TBH, Window Maker</a> was my first, on Debian Potato), but it's not that stable on Wayland. (Sorry, guys, I think X11 is dying.) Gnome is the least worst alternative I could find.</p>
Earlier this year, I tried different window managers: sway</a>, river</a>, and niri</a>. I think niri is the way to go for me, since I'm not really a fan of tiling window managers (I tried sway with a tabbed layout by default). I was a fan of the OS X workflow between 2010 and 2015 when there was a workspace for each application. I can't use more than two applications at the same time since most of my workflow is keyboard-driven, and that's why I work with two monitors. The left monitor is usually the one I'm working on, while the right one is dedicated to something I have to look at, like documentation, websites, or logs.</p>
Niri really nails down this way of working. The only thing that keeps me away from a window manager is the hundreds of small utilities I have to manage to have a complete working environment: a notification daemon, a top bar, a launcher, a network manager, a screen locker, a power manager… It's too much for me to handle.</p>

Week 27

Unknown — Sun, 06 Jul 2025 00:00:00 +0000

This is a summary of week 27:</p>
Taking notes</h2>
I'm not really a neat person, so I need some kind of system to keep my notes organized. I tried different systems in the past, from Zettelkasten</a> to BASB</a>, but in the end, no complex system worked for me.</p>
This week, I set up a minimal workflow to help me collect and digest the information I need.</p>
As an old-time Emacs user, I'm using Org-mode, Orgzly Revived</a>, and Wallabag</a> to keep track of the stuff I came across online. I'm going to dig into this workflow in a separate blog post.</p>
Python and data science</h2>
I've used Python when I was a freelancer (mostly Django projects), but when I had the chance to start my business, I chose Clojure</a> as the main language (another possible blog post about why).</p>
Unfortunately, some very useful Python libraries are yet to be fully matched by a Clojure counterpart, especially in the data science field. Years ago, I took a "Machine Learning" course by Andrew Ng on Coursera, and the whole course was based on Octave</a>. Early this year I started the same course, and now it's fully on Python and Jupyter notebooks.</p>
So I'm working to brush up on my Python knowledge. My goal is to create some ML/AI proofs of concept with it, and then refine or integrate them with Clojure.</p>
Projects</h2>
Last year, I took over a dye formulation and quality control software for the textile industry from another developer. This involves quite some math and patience, since the source code is Python and Vue.js. Anyway it's fun to play with spectrophotometers.</p>
In my "free time", I'm working on a project (Clojure, this time) for extracting structured data from digital documents (PDF/docx/images), such as technical sheets or certificates of analysis.</p>
Personal health</h2>
There were some not-so-good moments in the past week: I had a couple of anxiety hiccups: I dealt with them quite well, but still a PITA. My mood swings from "I can do it" to "I'm a fraud". I'm lucky to have my partner's support, encouraging me to go out and try not to think too much about work. Also, my two dogs cheer me up when I am in a bad mood.</p>

Babù and Penny, my two maltese dogs.</figcaption> </figure>

Summing up

Unknown — Sat, 28 Jun 2025 00:00:00 +0000

It is perhaps a bit strange to start a blog by summing things up… but it is still a starting point.</p>
Current status</h2>
I'm 44 years old and I've been a software developer for 25 years. 10 years ago, I started a consulting and development company. I thought it was the best way to do what I loved: solving other people's problems with creativity, intelligence and elegance.</p>
It turns out it's not what I expected: money always gets in the way, so you end up doing stuff you don't like or picking projects you don't care much about. I think it's part of the consulting way: being able to work on what you love is quite a luxury these days.</p>
Of course, there were also happy times. We worked on really interesting projects, on topics that I'd never dreamed of dealing with, with fun mental and technical challenges,</p>
Yes, reader, this is a "down" moment for me.</p>
What to do about it</h2>
When difficulties arise, I usually "play dead" (thanatosis</a>), and wait for the events to solve. This behavior is probably the cause of many of my life discontent.</p>
Not this time.</p>
I'm going to focus on my health, on my studies, and on producing something meaningful to me. Also, I'll try my best to have fun again.</p>
There are a lot of possibilities out there, I just have to choose and, more importantly, stop being passive.</p>
I'm going to keep this blog updated once a week to keep track of my progress, sharing my journey along the way.</p>

Marco Dalla Stella

Week 28/26

Week 19/26

Up to week 43

Code</h2>

Week 39

Code</h2> I didn't code much outside daily work this week, due to the personal stuff aforementioned.</p>

Week 38

Week 37

Code</h2> Clojure still amazes me, even after more than ten years: the community continues to produce wonderful stuff… It's inspirational.</p>

Week 35 and 36

Week 34

Week 33

Week 32

Week 31

Work</h2> I'm still thinking about my future. I'm digging into different directions:</p>

Week 29

Week 28

Desktop environment</h2> In the last few months, I moved from Gnome to KDE, and back to Gnome.</p>

Week 27

Summing up

Work</h2>
I'm still thinking about my future. I'm digging into different directions:</p>