Password requirements: myths and madness
Password requirements are weird. It seems impossible to set a new password in many websites. Why?
Alan Franzoni
Ransomware-resistant backups with duplicity and AWS S3
Why you should care about ransomware attacks even for irrelevant internet-connected systems, and how to use duplicity with AWS S3 to create ransomware-resistant backups.
Log4j haters: just STFU
I think the behaviour of many people towards log4j developers and towards the project is simply ridiculous. I understand the memes; it's the internet, after all. But I can read posts and tweets by many IT professionals - developers, managers, security engineers - that treat the log4j project and the
Consistent Hashing for Dummies
Today I'll discuss about an interesting concept: consistent hashing. It's a widely employed technique to properly perform sharding in distributed storage systems. I'm not aiming at a rigorous explanation (please don't use the raw snippets I provide in production code!), but I hope I can make the concept simple enough.
The curse of the downvote
I don't have strong opinions on Facebook - I'm not even a user anymore - but I think that the "like/dislike" mania is going a bit too far. I've read yesterday that an engineer was fired from Facebook for having a YouTube channel, but that's beyond the scope of
Machine Learning: a sound primer
How to start with machine learning? Some serious, yet practical, suggestions.
Standalone, single-file, editable Python scripts WITH DEPENDENCIES
How badly I wanted something like that? The problem: Python for scripting Beside programming and data science, I find Python to be a very useful glue language; I think it's great for shell replacement when bash/zsh scripts get too complex, but there's one caveat: as long as you can
Application authors: please don't force users into your language or packaging details
This story has been boiling in my head since long; today I chose to (finally) publish it. Long story short: in order to use a certain application, I should not need to understand how to use the language or its packaging ecosystem. Delivery and distribution is a relevant part of
Misaligned Expectations: investigating the expectations gap
As some of my followers already know, I'm enrolled in the great Master's program at Georgia Tech, the OMSCS. As a part of my studies, I'm doing some research to investigate the expectations gap between the higher education and the industry sectors; why does the university teach students this way?
SCP taming: stop local silliness
Every day now and then, I get an scp command wrong. Scp is designed after commands like rcp and works totally fine for local-to-local file copy. While this can (or could) be useful in some contexts, It's not what I like to do these days; very often, if either hosts