(Fabio Alessandro Locati|Fale)'s blog

On buying intelligence as a service

 October 19, 2026

In the last couple of years, most companies have adopted some kind of AI. Most of them have done so by buying API access from a small number of frontier labs. This approach has the lowest barrier to entry and is often the preferred starting point, but it’s problematic because of the huge, unmanageable costs it creates, the shrinking, potentially useless gap in capabilities with open-weight models, and many sovereignty issues.

Squash git commits

 September 14, 2026

I often review git pull/merge requests (PRs) both for work and open source projects. Many of those PRs have a number of commits with commit messages like “fix”, “actual fix”, “fix again”, or other similar forms. I understand why this happens, even more in repositories where it is far easier to trigger the continuous integration (CI) pipeline, rather than execute the tests manually. Having multiple commits in a PR is not problematic by itself, since it might make sense to slice the accomplished work further than 1 commit per PR, but it needs to be done in a logical way.

On finding vulnerabilities and shipping fixes

 August 17, 2026

Over the last year, I’ve watched AI models and tools that find vulnerabilities in code take a central role in security industry communications. Every few weeks, a new product announcement promises impressive results, such as AI tools that detect SQL injection, spot memory corruption bugs, identify logic flaws at scale, or chain tens of known vulnerabilities together. This can be impressive for attack purposes, but it is more an interesting novelty than defensive security.

Red Hat EX467 exam

 July 9, 2026

Last Friday, I renewed my Red Hat Certified Specialist in Managing Automation with Ansible Automation Platform (EX467) certification. As I’m already a Red Hat Certified Architect and have passed this same exam about three years ago, I wasn’t too worried about it.

The exam still focuses on leveraging the Ansible Automation Platform in enterprise environments rather than writing Ansible code, which remains the domain of the EX294. Compared to three years ago, the platform version has been updated, but the overall structure and approach felt familiar. Timewise, the exam continues to be completable well within the allocated time if you have enough experience with the platform. This time it took me 1 hour and 38 minutes to go through it.

On Podman 6 and weeding out legacy

 June 25, 2026

Podman 6.0 was released yesterday. This is a fairly big and important release, since they removed the support for cgroups v1, iptables, CNI, slirp4netns, and BoltDB. All features that depend on those dependencies have not been dropped; they are only supporting the modern replacements that have been available and the defaults for a while. In fact, they are now provided by cgroups v2, nftables, Netavark, Pasta, and SQLite, respectively.

I have been running Podman on my personal infrastructure for a few years now, mostly using Quadlet to manage services through Systemd. Personally, I do not envision any impact for me, since I already use all the new alternatives. Similarly, all other Fedora users should have a fairly smooth upgrade, unless they forced any of the removed options in their config, which should be very rare.

Btrfs scare

 May 31, 2026

Last weekend, I updated and rebooted the system, but it did not come back online. Checking with IPMI revealed that the ata-2 disk was not responding to the operating system, preventing a clean mount of the Btrfs filesystem and halting the system from completing the boot sequence.

My Btrfs array is composed of 6 SSD disks, all with different ages, except for the first two, which arrived together at the beginning. So, I was not overly concerned with one of the original disks failing. Sooner or later, it would have happened, and I was ready for it. Also, I set all data, metadata, and system to be RAID 1, so no data was at risk.

Fedora 44 released

 April 30, 2026

Three days ago, the Fedora project released Fedora 44. This release was delayed a couple of times due to an issue with the NVIDIA driver and installer. Since neither of those was relevant to me, I was not blocked by that. I appreciate that Fedora caters to many different kinds of users and use cases, and therefore, there might be delays for reasons that do not affect me.

I’ve used Fedora 44 on my laptop for months, but prefer stable versions for servers. The difference is due to the greater simplicity of rolling back on laptops compared to server systems. Since I use bootc on all my Fedora systems, it is enough to select the old version in grub if something goes wrong. But since the servers are headless, changing the grub selection might require finding a display and keyboard.

On the value of an automation platform

 March 31, 2026

Over the last 20+ years in IT, I’ve seen automation evolve from a nice-to-have to a non-negotiable part of how organizations operate. Every company I’ve worked with has some form of automation. The problem is that, in many cases, what they have is not an automation strategy but rather a collection of individual scripts, cron jobs, and one-off solutions that were built to solve immediate problems. This is what I usually call ad-hoc automation or point automation, and while it works in the short term, it creates significant issues over time. This does not happen only in small or particularly tech-adverse companies; it is a very common situation across sectors and sizes.

On the importance of thought leadership

 February 27, 2026

Over the last 20+ years in IT, I’ve been lucky enough to work across many roles and industries. In that time, I’ve always found that the work we do, and that we’re measured against, is only one side of the story. The other side, and often the most important one, is the work we share: the ideas, the rationale, the reasoning, the reflections that shape how others think. That is what thought leadership is about, why it matters more than ever in our industry, and why I started and continue doing it.

Red Hat Certified Specialist in Containers

 January 20, 2026

Yesterday, I passed the Red Hat EX188 exam, which allowed me to renew my Red Hat Certified Specialist in Containers certification.

I had a very good memory of this exam from the last time I took it, so I was happy to go through it again. Different from last time, I did encounter some difficulties with the last exercise, which was a little surprising to me, since the last time I found it testing the same capabilities as a walk in the park, but maybe this time I simply started with the wrong foot. This obviously had no major impact on my exam, allowing me to easily achieve and exceed the required score to pass.