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When I was a kid in Sicily, my mom and I would bike across the flight line at Comiso AB so I could play Frogger on a Commodore 64 at the BX. That C64 became the genesis of everything for me: games, programming, running a school newspaper, and eventually discovering BBSes. But there was one thing I wanted desperately and could never have. Mario. Yes, the original Mario Bros. (the one with the pipes and turtles) did exist on the C64. I knew that. But that wasn’t what I wanted. I wanted Super Mario Bros. The NES version. The one scrolling across the TV in every commercial, every magazine, and every other kid’s living room. ...

BLUF: If we keep burning junior talent today, we will have nobody to inherit tomorrow. The industry’s loss of patience with entry-level devs is creating a 20-year problem we are refusing to see. The Vanishing Entry Level Had a good conversation with fellow geeks Fernando Covatti and Dávid Kőszeghy about AI and junior programmers as we think about talent. Everybody is losing patience with juniors. Fair enough; they need hand-holding, they make mistakes, and they cost time. But here is the question nobody is answering: what happens in 20 years when the current senior engineers are retired? I think about this because I lived a version of it. ...

Mobile power generation in the field. BLUF: The new fuel for the field is electrons, not diesel. Having spent my career building military and ISR systems, I know firsthand that power generation is a massive bottleneck. Diesel is a logistical vulnerability—fuel convoys are targets, and traditional generators ruin noise discipline while lighting up thermal sensors. The Army developing the ISV-Heavy as a roving 60-kWh power station is a necessary shift in operational architecture. ...

Spain’s new mandate requiring telecom operators to maintain 4 hours of backup battery power at their transmission masts is a major victory for clean distributed energy assets at the edge of the grid. My buddy Jesse Gary was well ahead of the curve on this. Long before the current energy transition, he wasn’t advocating for deploying new diesel gensets, but rather utilising our existing ones as a strategic lever to supercharge investments into the clean energy space. His core argument remains absolute: any generation at the edge has usefulness, and by extracting maximum value from legacy infrastructure, we can fund and accelerate the transition to cleaner replacement assets like batteries. ...

The year was 1997. A younger, spikey-haired version of myself was running a shiny AMD K6 processor on Debian 1.3 “Bo.” At the time, I was working at a German ISP doing UNIX System Administration. It was a trial by fire where I learned how practical networking functioned whilst supporting customers in two languages. Flipping through an issue of Computer Shopper, I came across a DEC advertisement for their 500 MHz Alpha chip. ...