(very) late autumn 2025 update

Servus from Tara’s offline outpost!

We reached -6°C in the past days here and a dash of snow appeared. Nothing compared to the -12°C and the amount of snow I witnessed a few days ago in the Garmisch-Partenkirchen area. Beautiful… but… better experienced from the car! Even the UI of the car wasn’t able to display that temperature properly: the minus sign overlapped with another widget on the display.

I was undecided whether to write an autumn update or just “skip the season”. I haven’t done much that feels exciting from a tech perspective. Most of my time went into looking for my “next thing” - a new project, role, or collaboration, mostly in a freelance/independent capacity - in a market that has become quite challenging. The rest has been consumed by grief and emotional fatigue (I talked a bit about that in my summer post). In the end, I decided to put it down anyway, mostly for myself, so that I don’t forget what actually happened in these months.

I’ve tried to fly more, as my SEP/land qualification is due at the end of December. With the current weather and the time left, I’m not sure how much I’ll be able to do. I started familiarisation with a new amphibious plane, SE-MLJ. The baby is coming from Canada and it’s a rare R172 (yes, with R) with a three-blade variable-pitch propeller and a six-cylinder engine. Quite rare for that kind of aircraft. This type is called “complex”, and for a reason. She has quite a character. I think I’ll need a few hours before we fully understand each other.

I went to Berlin for the Ceph Days conference. I was afraid to go at the beginning, and I wouldn’t say I felt totally comfortable, but I’m glad I did it. I hadn’t been to an in-person conference since the pandemic and, being shy and introvert, it felt like a big step. There were good conversations, especially listening to some reports from Cephalocon. I wish I had been there too, but Vancouver was too far away for just a week and the cost wouldn’t have helped.

I really liked the way Hetzner crafted a proxy layer to spread and route buckets across multiple Ceph clusters in their object storage offering. I also appreciated the talk and proposal on how to improve CephFS replication performance between clusters. That’s quite important to me when I design Disaster Recovery/Business Continuity across multiple datacenters, especially now, in the AI era, where massive amounts of data need to be processed in an “HPC-like” fashion, in roles that once upon a time were relegated to Hadoop FS in the ML/ETL world. Last but not least, there were some hints about the upcoming FastEC feature, that I hope will finally enable us to use erasure coding for some block workloads (namely, virtualisation). In my personal experience, the replication factor in smaller clusters, although it increases data resilience, also increases costs, sometimes making Ceph economically unsustainable compared to some (more expensive) storage boxes such as Pure Storage or NetApp. It was also nice to go back to Berlin, although I didn’t have much time to stroll in the city centre.

I also basically completed my PursePC project, although -like the Hermit project- it will never be truly finished and will always be “ongoing as I use it”. I added a fuchsia theme to sc-im that finally gave it my touch of style. Ok, technically for ncurses I used magenta, but it’s close enough to the feeling. Console ncurses have limited colours available, yet that’s not a reason for me to leave the command line. I also added a battery indicator in tmux. In theory, it should have been an easy task, but it still took me a while to get my head around the fact that Nord theme likes to take control of the entire status bar and override anything in .tmux.conf. 🤦‍♀️ But I got there eventually. I bring my PursePC around and it fits even in my new bag. I’d love to use sc-im more, as I believe it’s a fantastic piece of software, but the truth is that nano is still the most used application, perhaps followed by MultiMail. Ah, I wish there was a QWK/offline equivalent for IMAP and standard mail apps. I’d love to download a “packet” and sync. But that’s another story.

In “previous episodes” I shared that the datacenter where my systems live is shutting down. The same company has another datacenter, paradoxically closer to my house in Milan, and I’ll move there. I surveyed the new rack and… as I’m friends with the owner and the CTO, they’ll put me adjacent to the core BGP routers 🙂 I’ve started removing servers from the old site and bringing them to the new location, but unracking everything takes time.. and R710s are quite heavy for a single person. The new location also has a less-than-ideal unloading area, so I need to carry the servers for a much longer distance. Luckily someone once taught me to remove all the weight, disks and PSUs, before moving a box.

I also went back “home” to Innsbruck again, even if I was there just two months ago. But it felt right to see my family and… let’s be honest… to visit the Christmas markets before the tourist madness floods the city, and to collect the precious tin of homemade Christmas biscuits from my aunt. It’s a tradition. Sometimes I dream of having a small studio there, so that I could really claim it as home.

I also booked my trip to FOSDEM. As per tradition, I’ll be in Brussels for the conference, which doesn’t really feel like a conference, but more like going to a Christmas market where, instead of crystal balls and decorations, you get ideas and bits, and where the flood of tourists is replaced by a flood of techies. It feels like breathing the air of open source, engineering, and that collaboration spirit I like so much.

I’m also thinking about another personal project, but I won’t spoil it. 😉 So you’ll have to check in here regularly. I hope I’ll have the time and energy to carry it on, but I’ve given myself permission to go at my own pace.

In the meantime, the cold has arrived, the tea cools too fast, and the blanket has returned to its rightful evening duty on the sofa. Angie curls beside me, I steal slices of pizza between chapters of a book, and I try to remember that this, right here, was always my promise to myself: less performing, more living.

Sooner or later, the wind of change will knock at my door. Work will come, routines will shift, trains will run, alarms will ring. But I don’t want to think about that yet. For the moment, I’m enjoying these cozy days.

Before I go: happy Sant’Ambroeus to those in and around Milan. I still remember walking to school as the city set up the fair (Oh Bej! Oh bej!): the scent of roasted chestnuts, vendors arranging their stalls, and that soft crack of frost under my shoes. Some traditions make winter feel just a little softer.

See you at the next season. 🌷💜

PursePC, now with the sc-im fuchsia theme and a working battery indicator (small victories count 🥰)

SE-MLJ, the R172 amphibious with plenty of character (we’re still learning each other) 🛩️