
May 23, 2022
We have seen a massive increase in the “real world” dependency on digital services in the last few years. This process will probably continue in the future, and we are not ready for it. In the same few years, we have seen a lot of cases where digital services went offline or got hacked. In a society that relies more and more on digital services, we can not afford such services not to be available or secure.
Read More 
April 27, 2022
A couple of years back, I wrote a blogpost on obtaining the previous Job ID in Ansible Tower workflow. Now, let’s go further and create another module to obtain the output of such a job.
Before moving further, I want to specify that I talk about Ansible Tower since this is the most known name for this software, but I could also be talking about AWX or Ansible Controller since those are the same codebase.
Read More 
April 25, 2022
I started to use ZX2C4’s pass back in 2016 to manage my passwords. I liked the idea behind pass, but I found it too hackish. For this reason, I moved to gopass at the end of 2017 because it was a far more complete implementation of pass from my point of view.
gopass is now part of my system, and I’m so used to it that it is hard for me to think about my workflows without gopass into them.
Read More 
March 31, 2022
On Friday, I had the opportunity to take scrum.org’s Professional Scrum Master I (PSM I) and Professional Scrum Product Owner I (PSPO I) exams.
I’ve started to prepare myself with a training course mainly focused on PSM I. Even though the training title was around PSM I, the course has been on the ideas and reasons behind scrum more than specifically on the certification.
I’ve then proceeded with a full read of the scrum guide.
Read More 
March 21, 2022
One of the first issues that I had to solve when I started to use gRPC was how to inject a DB connection pool to the function handling the request. The DB connection injection is needed because creating a new SQL connection every time there is a new gRPC request (and tearing it down at the end) is a massive waste of resources. Also, this approach could limit the scalability of the API since the database probably has a limited number of connections it will accept.
Read More 
February 22, 2022
gRPC is a very nice technology that allows the implementation of efficient APIs in a very efficient way. Thanks to gRPC and protobuf, you do not have to write much boilerplate code since the boilerplate code is generated automatically from the proto file. This works perfectly until both your client and server can perform gRPC calls. Luckily most of the languages have no issue with this. Still, the big exception is JavaScript (and other languages that will compile to JS, such as TypeScript) running in a browser.
Read More 
February 19, 2022
pdfcpu is a command-line tool to perform actions on PDF files. It allows to perform all the standard operations, such as merge, split, and rotate pages. It also allows less common operations such as changing the user and owner passwords, encrypting/decrypting, optimizing, etc.
The project started back in 2017, but I discovered it only last year. I like pdfcpu due to the high focus on allowing and making it easy to perform those kinds of operations in batch.
Read More 
January 25, 2022
In the last few weeks, there has been a lot of talking about Google Analytics and the GDPR. I think most of the comments around it have missed the whole picture.
A little bit of history Our brief history begins at the end of the ’90s when the EU and the US agreed on the International Safe Harbor Privacy Principles. On the 26th July 2000, the European Commission (EC) formalized it with the Commission Decision 2000/520/EC, where it was defined that data could be freely moved from the EU to the US.
Read More 
January 10, 2022
The CNIL, France’s data regulator, fined Meta (Facebook) and Google for violating the GDPR for a total of 210M€. More specifically:
Google LLC (USA) got fined 90M€ Google Ireland Limited got fined 60M€ Facebook Ireland Limited got fined 60M€ Also, if the companies will not fix the issue within three months, an additional penalty of 100'000€/day will be added.
There are two facts that I think are very interesting about these fines: the reason behind the fines the fines issuer
Read More 
December 31, 2021
In December 2020, the CentOS Project announced a series of changes. The three most important are:
the creation of CentOS Stream and the consequent rename of CentOS (the classic Linux distribution the project is known for) in CentOS Linux the anticipation to today (31/12/2021) of the End Of Life for CentOS Linux 8 the fact that CentOS Linux 8 is going to be the last and that from now on, only CentOS Stream will have new releases That announcement created a lot of different sentiments in the community and even more among the CentOS Linux users.
Read More