H3RALD - Tag 'rant' (RSS Feed)

Too many cooks... take #3

h3rald@h3rald.com — Sat, 24 Oct 2009 18:26:59 -0000

Like its predecessor, this is another rant about the (end of the) CakePHP framework. Not that I particularly enjoy writing about the misfortune of others, but after reading this official announcement I felt compelled to post.

It has been two years since my last post on this subject and yes, the cake is still rising, but at what price? Will it still taste sweet now that two of its main ingredients are not part of it anymore? As Daniel puts it, probably the best thing to do now is to drink tea and to wait until the dust settles…

As far as I’m concerned, what really matters is that Garrett Woodworth (former CakePHP Project Manager) and Nate Abele (former CakePHP Lead Developer) are gone. They realized they had enough Nuts over the years and they decided to switch to a more Lithium-rich diet. More helthy and depression-proof, too!

Stupid metaphors and painful jokes aside, this is probably the best piece of news the CakePHP community received in a long time: the birth of a fork of the CakePHP framework, more precisely of the so-called Cake3 branch.

Cake3? I didn’t keep up-to-date with the buzz, so I didn’t know anything about this until today, when I decided to finally start catching up.

“Cake 3.0, on the other hand, is pretty different from the existing core code in a few notable ways. Mainly, it’s been re-written from the ground up for PHP 5.3.”

from Cake 3 interview with Nate Abele, debuggable.com

Of course, in these three years of my full immersion in the Ruby language, I almost completely forgot about PHP too. PHP 5.3 means namespace and closures, i.e. the Rubyist’s daily bread. A more modular CakePHP, properly object-oriented, with an ActiveRecord-like API for models (finally!) is definitely worth a look, especially if it’s Nut-free as well.

The new framework will be called Lithium (sounds more professional already), and it’s due to launch next monday, here: http://li3.rad-dev.org/ (at the time of writing, this link is password-protected).

Personally, I am very excited about this new project. It should have happened three years ago, really, but there’s no point in being greedy: the time has finally come. I would like to (pre-)thank Garrett and Nate for their (upcoming) amazing work, I’ll definitely keep a closer eye on it.

Rails-powered Open Source Killer Apps, Anyone?

h3rald@h3rald.com — Sun, 02 Nov 2008 09:41:00 -0000

Lately I’ve been meandering around the web to find a good CMS for a family site I’d like to set up.
Why a CMS? Well, for a few simple reasons:

I don’t have enough free time to fiddle with Rails and make my own (I’m an Hobbyist Programmer™: I code for fun and enlightment, not for money)
Even if I had the time, I’m sure there are plenty of CMSes out there which suits my needs.

It turns out that reason #2 is not really applicable in this case, especially if we restrict the field to Ruby + Rails/Merb/<insert cool DRY framework here>.h3. Rails-powered CMSes

Name a Rails-powered CMS, quick!

Easy: Radiant.

Hmm, no. As much as I do like Radiant, it really cannot be considered a general-purpose CMS, can it? When it comes to build nearly-static sites in a clean and neat way I’d pick it any day, but it lacks quite a lot of community features like comments, ability to create forums, etc. etc. It does, however, support multilingual content in a rudimentary, yet effective way: create each translated page manually and use consistent URL conventions (/en/about, /it/about, etc.).

I’m not saying that there aren’t enough CMSes built on Rails, just that there’s no “killer app” in the pack. A “killer” CMS would be something as powerful as Drupal, but easier to use and more modular.

Here’s an incomplete list of the Rails CMSes I’m currently aware of:

Name	First Impressions/Comments
Radiant	Mature, suitable for administering static sites
Typo	Mature, one of the best blogging engines out there (my opinion is slightly biased though)
Mephisto	Mature, blogging engine
Rubricks	Under development, basic features if compared to other non-Rails solutions
Slate	Missing a lot of features if compared to competitors
Beast	Forum engine, extremely ligtweight
RailFrog	Not sure if it’s still being updated, not so many features
Zena	Alpha, looks promising although it doesn’t offer many features
simplelog	Yet another blogging engine. Simple and easy to use
oooopen rcms	Early development stage (dead?), minimal feature set
Geego	Multilingual, not so many out-of-the-box features

[Psst, if you know any other Rails CMS I missed out, mention it in a comment and I’ll update this table!]

Developing Proprietary Web Applications with Rails

What’s wrong with all of these? Normally one of three things: either they are mature, production-ready but focused on only one particular function (blog, forum, etc.), or they are still too new to be used seriously or they are slowly heading towards oblivion.

What’s going on here? Rails is a damn fine framework which offers all the modularity and power you need to build sites! Why isn’t there a fully fledged CMS to rival Drupal?
I think that part of the problem is that Rails is too good. Why build a CMS from scratch when you can develop a web site from scratch much more easily, tailored to your customer?

Rails has been used to build a few “mainstream” sites like Twitter (no bashing please!), Basecamp, GitHub and many more. What do these sites have in common? They are not open source. You cannot deploy your own Twitter on your server (You can with Laconica, though), you cannot deploy your own Basecamp to your server (you can with ProjectPier, an open source fork of ActiveCollab).

It feels like that even though Rails itself is open source, there aren’t that many open source Rails-powered projects after all. Maybe there are, but they do not really compare with similar alternatives offered in other languages. This is the reason why, despite its utter ugliness, PHP is still the Open Source King of the Web, and that’s very, very sad in my opinion.

Dreams on Rails

The annoying thing is that Rails is suitable to build CMSes, and good ones, too! Take Radiant and Typo, for example: they both excel in their own ways, in their own worlds.
Theorethically speaking, there’s no reason why someone couldn’t develop a modular system to glue different components together: you’d need common user administration and common workflow, a few hooks, and a solid set of conventions on how to build third-party components.
Hell guys, the folks at Drupal developed a huge (and successful) product with a million different ways to extend it in PHP. Even without using OOP! Every damn hook in the core is a function.

What does it take to do something like this using Rails, o Merb, or whatever else you like? You already have a very solid and consistent framework to build on (Rails), a way to automate tasks (Rake) and a language which lets you do everything you want, in a very elegant and organized way.

Rails lacks successful open source projects, in particular CMSes. I wish someone could fix this: not by coding the n^th^ CMS with the only two or three features you need, but by developing an high level application framework to build complex, dynamic and interactive web sites. Don’t even develop the whole damn thing: just come up with a set of conventions on how to extend a very basic core, and tell people how they can contribute, or even integrate existing applications into it.

The community will do the rest, hopefully… Or maybe are you too busy trying to roll out your newest, closed source startup?

If someone decides to develop such a powerful, high-level framework and is determined to keep it user-friendly and open source, I hereby promise to write the documentation for it, articles, and books. And I’m not kidding.

[UPDATED] A Glimpse of Hope

A few of the commenters of this article brought up a few interesting points and actually gave me a little bit of hope. Luigi Montanez pointed out that Rails was built to help developers build web sites. For now, Rails deployment isn’t as seamless as end users would like it, so there’s no point creating a killer app for such users if they can’t even get it to run on their $2/month shared hosting environment.
Nevertheless, there seems to be at least three different open source “social network engines” powered by Rails:

These are not CMSes in the early 2000’s sense, obviously, but they do provide the basis to effectively build a late Web 2.0-ish community web site. Each one of these project seems stable and mature enough to be used in production, but surely not as well-known as many other PHP-based solutions.

On the other hand, Priit Tamboom mentioned adva cms, a project still in alpha stage which aims to be more traditional and site-agnostic:

“[…] Different from other Rails applications the all-engines approach of adva cms allows you to build your own applications on top of it. It also makes it very flexible and extensible: our plan is to make it possible to only pick those engines/features that you really need for your application and omit the rest. As they are still all designed to work together seemlessly and reuse each others functionality the whole plattform feels much more consistent to a collection of similar but separate Rails applications. […]”

This sounds exactly like what I was hoping would come out from the Rails community: something in between a web development framework and an high-level CMS.
I’m definitely going to try it out (it’s an ideal weekend project) and I’ll report back once I know more about it.

10 reasons why I didn't update my blog

h3rald@h3rald.com — Thu, 12 Jun 2008 01:30:00 -0000

“It has been a while since my last post, sorry about that”
I read this sentence (or something along those lines) on many blogs on the Internet, including mine. As a matter of fact, I actually didn’t write a meaningful post on my blog for a long time and no, probably this is not going to change that either.

Yesterday I started thinking why this happens, not only to me but to a lot of other non-professional bloggers. A professional blogger &emdash; for what I can tell &emdash; is someone like Michael Arrington or Gina Trapani: someone who has the luck (or course) to be able to just blog for a living.

I don’t blog for a living: my site is self-sustaining via a few very unobtrusive ads, just that. I have a full time job, and I blog in my spare time about my interests, without even trying to make “proper” money from my site. There’s nothing wrong with it: I believe there are some other people in my condition, and that’s quite normal.

That being said, let’s examine the ten most common reasons why I (and you too, maybe) end up not updating my blog, even when I have time to do so.h3. Someone already blogged about it

This is very irritating. I am obsessed with original content. I want to write about something other people never (or hardly ever) wrote about. As a consequence, I often find myself googling the same topic I’m planning my blog post on, and I obviously often get quite a few results, too!

I actually wanted to title this very post “The Blogger’s Block”, but I immediately thought of putting that very title into Google, just to see if someone else already blogged about it. Sure they did! Not original at all, tough luck.
It also happened a few weeks ago: I wanted to write about the current state of tech news sites and Antonio Cangiano comes up with a similar post. Very interesting indeed, but quite annoying as well!

OK scrap that, think about something else…

This can potentially go on for days, and the only solution is of course trying not to worry about it, and just write the damn thing (that’s what I did to write this post).

I didn’t research enough on the subject

This happens tipically with reviews, round-ups, etc. Things I actually enjoy writing, but which may be easily subject to (harsh) criticism unless ou do them right.
I wanted to write a review of the new Treo 750 I bought. I’ve been using for a while, I learnt a few interesting hacks etc. etc. Unfortunately the 3G iPhone came out, so everyone is all hyped up about it. Too bad that I, being Italian and living in Italy, I never actually touched the damn thing!
What has that got to do with my Treo 750? Well, it would be nice to write a review of a Windows Mobile 6 phone comparing to the upcoming Apple wonder, wouldn’t it?

The solution to this would be trying to limit the scope of your post: screw Apple, let’s just focus on my Treo 750 and on the amazing amount of programming languages I can use on it!

After researching for X days, I realized it was all a waste of time

This happens with big articles. I once thought about writing a comprehensive article about all the possible ways to deploy a Ruby on Rails web site. Cool, isn’t it? I started researching about all the most esoteric lightweight web servers, about JRuby, Glassfish, IronRuby, … A lot of things. And new solutions kept coming up, and with them more and more posts, and then even entire books on the subjects.

Very frustrating. I abandoned the whole thing, because there was simply no reason to go on researching: it was all a waste of time.

How to fix this? Again, reduce the scope of your article so that you are able to reduce the time you spend researching about it. Or maybe try to get paid to write it, so that even if there’s plenty of articles about the same subject, at least you have a concrete purpose to write yours.

Erhm, yes, by the way, keep an eye on SitePoint in the next few days/weeks, OK?

I only write when I’m inspired, and now I’m not

Very, very common. I normally think about a very cool article to write in the evening, or early in the morning, or whenever I don’t have access to a computer or the Internet.
Of course I don’t forget about it, but by the time I have a chance to actually write it, I really don’t fancy doing so. Oh, the irony!
It happened today, actually, during my lunch break: I was supposed to write this post but I didn’t feel like it. I lost my inspiration and all my artistic verve, so no, it can’t be done. Tough luck, wait until next time.

How did I solve this? Well, I started writing the post in my coffee break: there was no way to finish it in time, of course, but at least I started it.
I also saved it to my PDA and continued writing it when I had a chance. Eventually, I managed to finish it during my lunch break, the next day.

Try to write whenever you are inspired. If you are not inspired in your lunch break, do some work in your lunch break and then write when, in an hour or so, probably, you feel like writing again.

This won’t make Digg’s front page

Digg, Reddit, DZone, you name it. They are all excellent free tools for promoting your content. Don’t tell me you never wrote a post for the sake of making the front page of one of those sites. I did, I confess.
I didn’t make Digg’s front page in a while, and I’m probably never going to make it again. The reason? When it comes to promoting the right content in a fair way Digg sucks. As a consequence, 80% of the articles which appear on Digg suck. I’m sure you’ll be able to forgive my French when I say that Digg utterly sucks.

No matter how clever your story may be, unless you’re backed up by a swarm or an active community willing to Digg your story, you simply aren’t going to make it. When is the last time a proper programming article made it to Digg? I don’t remember, probably way before I unsubscribed to the Digg’s Technology feed, about a year or so ago.

Just write for the sake of writing. Don’t even submit your story to Digg (unless you’re writing about the iPhone, of course, then you may have a chance): post it to a less-known site, maybe, or to Reddit, instead. You won’t get as much traffic, granted, but you also won’t get tons of idiots writing pointless crap on your site and you won’t risk a server crash. If it’s destiny, then some good soul will post it to Digg, but nobody will digg it. That’s just life, I’m afraid.

It has been too long since my last post: the next one will have to make up for it

This happens when you start feeling guilty because you didn’t post in a long time.

“My next post is going to be superb, long, interesting and everyone will start flocking back to my blog!”

Wrong. First of all because statistically people just don’t “flock back” because you bestowed them of one interesting post (you have to keep up, too), and second because by doing so your mind will automatically discard all those bits of things you wanted to write about, but you never did because you’re waiting for that special next post which will be so much better and will bring your blob back to ~~spam~~ life.

It happened, it happened… again, all you have to do is just post all the tidbits you need, while you’re preparing your big shot: your blog will remain “fresh” and more people will enjoy your interesting posts, whenever they’ll come.

Nobody gives a damn, anyway

I didn’t want to upset my younger audience by using a nasty f-word in the title, but that’s exactly how it feels like it, sometimes.
I went to Rome last week, did you know? I twittered about it, you ought to know! And of course you’ll all be waiting for the usual 10-page-long article on my awesome vacation. Like when I went to London, remember?
No, sadly not everyone may be interested in this crap. So I probably won’t post about it: who cares? When you start thinking like this, you may stop posting for weeks: not everyone may be interested in everything you post, and I believe that’s normal.
Especially for a blog like mine, which is deliberately open to all my interests: programming, technology, travelling, etc. That’s why most blogs try to be themed: they write about a particular subject, even a single programming project, and they (try to) do it well. The trade-off is that a themed blog may run out of posts amazingly quickly, if you’re not carefula and if you’re not 100% devoted to your blog’s theme.
A themed blog will build up a faithful audience, like when I was writing almost exclusively about CakePHP: a lot of PHP programmers where flocking here daily. Then things went wrong and I really couldn’t be bothered to write about the same crap. Which leads us to the next topic…

If I write about this, a large chunk of my audience is going to be upset

This applies especially to themed blogs: if you’re a well-known Firefox addict, you can’t suddenly start writing about Opera, praising its speed and the features it offers out-of-the box!
If you take a side, you’d better stick to it, if you want your audience to stick to you: the ten people who happen to read this blog are probably quite shocked by the amount of times I “changed side”: from CakePHP and PHP to Rails and Ruby, from Firefox to Opera (well, wait until my next SitePoint article comes out, at least…). Probably they are not the same people who read this blog a year or so ago.

In the end, it’s entirely up to you: if you are prone to radically change our opinion (and this happen in technology, much more than in politics), which involves changing the whole theme of your blog, maybe you should consider not having a themed blog at all.
And if you don’t feel 100% sure you want a themed blog, you definitely shouldn’t go for a themed domain name, or you may end up abandoning it afterwards. And when that happens, unless you’re writing damn cool posts like Why, it’s going to hurt your audience. On the other hand, if you’re sure you’ll get ten times more visitors, go for it.
No, h3rald.com stays… I may end up raving about Safari at some point within the next ten years though, don’t be upset!

I’m not an expert on the subject, so I shouldn’t blog about it

This is a common problem I have when I try to write about something I don’t know extensively enough. When I started to learn Ruby, I was eager to start writing about it: it seemed just too cool to be true!
I thought about writing a longish post on learning Ruby from scratch, but then I realized it wouldn’t have been a great idea: I was just starting to learn a new language, I didn’t know all the nitty-gritty and writing about it to teach others was going to be a bit presumptuous, maybe!
Instead, I opted for a lighted 10 reasons to learn Ruby article, clearly stating in the first paragraph that I was just a noob getting excited about his new toy. It worked, actually: people seemed to enjoy it, and I was partially excused for the few mistakes I made here and there.
You don’t have to be an expert to blog about something: you just have to be totally honest about what you know, and what you don’t know.

There are a lot of professional bloggers out there, and I’m not one of them

Finally, this can be summarized in two words: inferiority complex. “Proper” blogs fire out 10+ posts per day, and I don’t even write ten points in a month! Again, those a professional bloggers: they live for blogging (and make an awful lot of money out of it), and they most likely have someone else blogging for them, too!
Think of TechCrunch or LifeHacker, for example: they have a small legion of talented writers working for them &emdash; even if Michael Harrington does rant about Twitter about three times a week himself, though.
At the end of the day, what matters is the quality of your posts. Not the length minf, the Quality. I personally think that non-professionals (I said “non-professionals”, not “amateurs”!) are allowed to write about once a week, if they can provide good content, that is.

But you still do have to write at least once a week (OK, let’s make it ten days), otherwise either you’re justified (you genuinely don’t have time) or you may be a victim of one of these common fears. Watch out, and happy blogging!

Too many cooks... take #2

h3rald@h3rald.com — Sun, 02 Sep 2007 04:41:00 -0000

Today I was not going to post on my blog. I have the flu, I don’t feel very well so I started reading some news feeds on Google Reader. That lasted for about half an hour, so I decided to check my old Netvibes account where I kept other feeds, including a bunch of CakePHP-related blogs.

Two posts immediately grab my attention:

I don’t trust CakePHP or what should you say in public?

and

Bye, bye, CakePHP team

They’re both from Daniel’s cakebaker blog, the one I used to read when I was really into Cake.

To cut a long story short, apparently Daniel said something wrong and he got “what he deserves” for speaking out. Naughty boy!

That’s because it might have put “CakePHP and the team in a bad light”. Well, I don’t know about that, but definitely now it IS in a bad light!

I even found a bunch of comment which link this incident to what happened to me a few months ago:

“I said it when Fabio/H3rald left, and I’ll say it again—I think the biggest weakness of Cake is that the core dev team is quick to cut people out who don’t hold to every dogma the devs do. Fundamentalism, ego, call it what you will, a great community will only count for so long if the core keeps alienating its biggest allies. (not that they’re neccessarily alienating you, dho. I truly hope you stick around. You do seem to be taking it well.)”

^{^} Whoever you are, you’re 100% right.

A core asset (at least for his writings) of the CakePHP team is gone, and another (big) chunk of CakePHP PR strategy is out of play, now, it seems. While I’m sorry the CakePHP community has to get the butt-end of it as always, I’m certainly happy for Daniel who, like me, will now have a chance to look around and experiment with new things. That’s right man, Rails or Django are the way to go.

Time for a diet...

h3rald@h3rald.com — Fri, 09 Mar 2007 10:59:00 -0000

My fiancée keeps telling me that too many cakes are not good for me, and I never listen: I always liked cakes! I did like the CakePHP™¹ framework too, once, and I did write some articles about it in the past, and I believe at least a bunch of Bakers found them useful, especially at the time.
I do believe the Cake™ Software Foundation¹ quite liked having their framework featured on popular websites like php|architect and SitePoint, and I believe that I contributed – to some extent – to make it one of the most popular frameworks available for the PHP programming language.

Unfortunately though someone decided that two of such articles and my personal website were no longer worth a mention on CakePHP official website frontpage. To me, this makes sense since the two CakePHP-related series which are being published by IBM are much more up-to-date than my articles, and thus deserve such a mention instead.

Oddly enough, I took a screenshot of the CakePHP website just yesterday “by chance” and my articles were still there:

…while this morning they weren’t anymore:

Of course I can’t provide any proof that I took the screenshot yesterday, and of course I don’t have any proof of the fact that someone in CSF may have thought that due to my recent bad behavior my articles didn’t deserve to be publicized anymore. I am confident that the Cake Software Foundation always does its best in keeping its site up-to-date, and I am glad that yesterday’s accident reminded them that there were far better articles which needed to be featured on their site. At least I finally did something good for the community!

Sarcasm apart, I feel I owe an apology for blowing this whole thing out of proportions: I disclosed embarassing details about our past project which – for the sake of the framework – should have never been made public, perhaps.
I want all of you to know that I still think that CakePHP is the best PHP framework ever made and I genuinely think that Larry E. Master did outstanding work in all this time, along with the rest of CSF members and contributors. Best of luck for your future editorial and development projects.

Since now my contributions are no longer “officially recognized”, I think I’d better to move on devoting my attention to something else.

¹ “CakePHP” and “Cake” seems to be registered trademarks of the Cake Software Foundation Inc. I’m not sure if I’m allowed to use them in this blog — If anyone has any problem with it, please let me know.

Thoughts about the Italian Academic Education

h3rald@h3rald.com — Thu, 07 Jul 2005 20:30:00 -0000

I found this article today, buried in my mailbox. I wrote it just over five years ago, the evening after failing the last, insignificant exam necessary to get my degree in IT Engineering.

I eventually passed the damn thing, got my B.Sc., and found a great job right afterwards, while all my former fellow students were still studying pointless crap. Maybe some of them are still studying pointless crap right now, and they’re still living with their parents.

I was very lucky. If I didn’t fail that exam perhaps I would have kept studying for my master’s degree for years, and maybe today I wouldn’t even have a job, or be married!

I decided to re-publish this article because it’s part of what I am, and I’m not ashamed of it. I corrected a few of the most obvious spelling and grammar mistakes, but I didn’t edit it or censor it otherwise.

It may be a senseless rant, but my opinion of the Italian Education System is still the same: If I’ll have a child who wants to study anything technical someday, I’ll tell him/her to get the hell out of Italy and go abroad to study in a real university.

Fabio Cevasco — Saturday, July 31st 2010

The Pre-computer Age

Who am I? I’m just an Italian student taking the last exams to obtain my B.Sc. in IT Engineering. Obviously I’m quite interested in Information Technology and everything concerning computers or the Internet, and – believe it or not – this probably came from my parents’ original dislike of computers themselves.

in Italy, unlike in most of the other capitalistic countries of the world, kids tends to listen to their parents until they reach their “full maturity”, i.e. 25 years of age at least (by the way, I’m 22), so, to cut a long story short, I was allowed to have a computer at home when I was 16 years old. I couldn’t believe it when the technician brought it at home: sure I’d seen a computer before in my life, but that was mine, and I could use it to do something amazing, as I dreamt many times.

The point is, from another point of view, that I felt behind already compared to my friends who were already boasting their records at various computer games. Fools.
On another note, I was a bit different from other Italian kids: I always liked writing and reading in English since I was 6, because I found the language to be quite amazing or even magic for the way it sounded, as I used to say to my friends. Friends – the Italian ones, that is – who never really understood me totally, and in particular my
passion for the Anglo-Saxon cultures: for them, writing and reading in English were just boring and difficult things you had to do at school, while I enjoyed reading The Tempest by Shakespeare when my English teacher didn’t even teach me the past tense, yet. A fool?

My passion for the English language was soon noticed by my parents, who let me go to England a few times, to college: basically a fashonable way for english schools and travel agencies to rob honest families, promising them that their kids would have learnt a new language enjoying themselves. Result: the kids enjoyed their holiday a lot, but basically always spoke Italian to each other (and even to English people over there) and the families were happy when they came back because after spending so much money they must have learnt something…

Using the Computer and the Internet

Back to that amazing and weird magic box called computer: I immediately enjoyed experimenting new stuff, playing with Windows (for me the word “Linux” at the time would have sounded not too different from some names of medicines my grandparents were taking), and even playing games, why not, but in English of course, because I never
really liked Italian translations (yes, we even dub video games!).
I remember my biggest fear was not being able to catch up with my friends who had a computer for years: I was so obsessed with that that I often stayed on the PC more than the 2-3 hours allowed by my parents, when they were away. Some time later, and relatively recently, I discovered that I catched up relatively soon, without even noticing it.

I’ve been allowed to access the Internet when I turned 18, because my parents were scared it could be just another bad thing, and still I found myself behind if compared to my friends, who’ve been surfing the web long before.

Only now I notice that perhaps my parents made me discover new things about PCs which my friends never bother learning, even now that they’re graduating. I remember my mum calling me for a silly pseudo-scientific divulgative program where they were describing this new, totally free operating system different from Windows who was supposed to work much better. “It said the name before… it’s Luxi… lixi… lunis…” – Linux.

When I had access to the Internet my life really changed. I do believe that unlike my friends I used the Internet for its very purpose: sharing knowledge, or, in my case, just learning. I also made a vow to myself: to surf ONLY (unless I had to) English/International websites; a vow which I’m keeping still nowadays, which seemed utterly illogic
to my friends and Italians in general.

Immediately a whole new universe opened to my eyes: I quickly learnt how to keep up-to-date on the recent events regarding computers, I learnt some rudiments of Internet and Hacking Culture (thanks ESR for all your papers) and the Open Source movement, and linux, etc. and I noticed two things:

I was definetely catching up with my friends’ “knowledge” in computing
I would have NEVER ever managed to learn even 1/10 of all you need to know about computers: the same as in life, and I was happy with it.

The Pre-academic Period

In the meantime I was studying in a Liceo Scientifico, a kind of scientific high school where basically they make you study all sort of subjects (from geography, to maths to phylosopy, to Latin) mainly focusing – they say – on Science-related disciplines. For those who don’t know, in Italy you don’t get to choose what you want to study: in
High School and University they let you choose basically a type of school, but subjects and courses cannot be changed, apart from a few exceptions.
I “chose” a particular type of scientific school (…the exception!) where basically I agreed to study an additional subject – Computer Science – in addition to all the rest, for a total of more than 30 hours per week. I studied a lot then, because my parents taught me that Culture was important, and that “if you’re ignorant you can’t do anything nowadays”. No, my parents weren’t ignorant themselves, my dad is a Mechanical Engineer and my mum a Latin/History/Italian professor …and yes, that helped my forma mentis a lot.

I studied a wide range of subjects, including something totally irrelevant with my favourite ones: English and Computing (note: I say “Computing”, not Maths), and I did quite well in the end, graduating from High School with a mark of 100/100. While I was studying Latin, Phylosophy and alikes I was thinking that at least at University I’d have studied something really more specific.
Until the end I was undecided on which faculty to choose, whether IT Engineering or Foreign Languages. I was very fond of English and languages in general, but I primarly liked computers, so I thought that if I studied IT Engineering I’d have learnt more about computers and my already half-decent knowledge of the English language would
have helped me in my studies (“Now they REQUIRE a good knowledge of English, at university”) and in my future, when I’d have started working. FOOL.

Alice in Wonderland

That was it, I remember exactly when I went to sign my pre-enrollment papers: IT Engineering. I was so happy to have made it! Now finally I would have studied what I was meant to.

On a side note, I was never too good at Maths, I don’t know why. I just didn’t like it because it felt too theorethical for me, and not as useful as I thought,
especially for programming. In High School I was taught a bit of the Pascal 3 programming language, and that turned out to be perhaps one of the most useful things I’ve ever studied.

The first disappointment came from the courses that they setup for the first year: two BIG Maths-oriented exams in particular, and Chemistry(!). What Chemistry has to do with Computer Science remained a mystery to me, people claimed that we might be asked in the future to do some programs to help studying the structure of matter and doing
chemical analysis… yes, and following the same logic I should have been studying the structure of languages, because AI programs and translators would certainly become key applications in the future.

Oddly enough, they made us just study Chemistry.

“But next year will be better” — I was thinking, after getting fairly poor results in the Maths exams — “next year we’ll study something more exciting”.

Economics.

They made us study Economics because they think that it’s useful to know something about finance and salaries, especially when you start working. That makes sense, to an extent, of course, and it was kind of interesting even. But still I didn’t study anything really useful.

This is a little lie, actually, because we actually had two programming exams (out of 17) in which they taught us a bit of C++, and THAT was interesting, and I even managed to get 30/30 out of the last one: I liked it.

I actually remember when the teacher came in, and insisted for us to use a unix emulator (Cygwin) to compile our C++ programs: people thought that “emulators” were used for running games released for a gaming console on the PC, and what the hell was unix? It looks like – they said – a bad copy of DOS with more difficult commands. (No comment)

I lived my years at University (three, counting this one which will be the last one) feeling superior to my friends for knowing more about computers but at the same time inferior to them when it came to exams: I didn’t really like most of the subjects, especially some rather abstract mathematical models which COULD BE useful, but – let’s
say it all – most people outside Italy don’t really give a sh…illing about. What’s the point in learning the demonstration of Cauchy theorem? Just use it maybe, and it would have a sense… No, they wanted you to study the demonstration and tell them about it, without missing a passage, which normally – for 2/3 of people at least – meant
“learn it by heart”.

Also, unlike in other countries, professors are more similar to Gods than clever people, apart from a few exceptions. Every professor decides how the students have to take the exams, some of them opt for having some compitini (little tests) during the semester and then the average mark on all of them (normally two or three) represents the
exam’s final mark: that’s the best, probably, but it could also mean that people can cheat trying to copy from their collegues, etc.

Normal, get on, it’s Italy!

Some professors might allow you to use the notes you took during classes, but that’s often considered a bad thing because people can potentially copy from one another (“What’s that piece of paper, is it your friend’s?” – “No, it’s part of my notes”), and they often do. On the other hand, if a professor doesn’t allow notes to be used, students
normally do their best to sneak and use them anyway.

This is Italy, after all, the place where everything can be sorted out if you’re cunning enough.

But why do some people cheat? Oh well, simply because either you devote 3 full years of your life to studying pointless crap and forgetting that you’re wasting the best years of your existence, or you have to do something to pass 10 exams a year. Because we REALLY do take 10 exams a year.

My girlfriend (who’s English and living in Italy, by the way) told me that her brother wanted to study Computing at University but switched to Politics & Journalism because they wanted him to learn Java on the very first year. I’ve never been taught Java — I had to learn it all by myself for my final thesis (see below) — but instead I learnt a ton of demonstrations of theorems and mathematical models. Great, isn’t it?

“But you knew you were going to take those exams, because they are publicly available before enrolling”.

That’s true and it makes sense, and I probably should have chosen Computer Science instead of IT Engineering if only it was considered equally important. In Italy if you study Engineering you can (after taking yet another exam) become an Engineer, which — unlike other countries — is not a competent person who knows how to fix stuff and can solve problems. Rather, he’s someone who got an important academic title who is treated like a demi-god because he knows (or should know) what’s a differential system and how can be solved but — sometimes — doesn’t know how to use it.

But he’s an Engineer, and he can find work when others can’t.

To explain this concept to non-Italian, I can summarize all this with the following:

In Italy Academic (Skool) Titles rulez – You ain’t got none? You ain’t nothin’ coz I got one and I own you.

And that’s that. In Italy knowledge is dead. (This is an exaggeration, but please try to get my point).

If you need to be competent in something, when you’re working you’ll have to do a practical course (even paying for it yourself) if some “knowledge” is needed. If there’s no risk that things can blow up, you can remain ignorant.

The Vanishing Cheshire Cat

Up to today I could leave with it, I knew that abroad the situation was hopefully different, but I started to cope with the fact that I would have got my B. Sc. and in addition I knew more stuff than some of the others who got the degree at the same time. A few months ago I had just a few exams left and I started going to the lab for my thesis project, with a friend of mine.

At that point — oddly enough — I was told to develop an application in Java, using some libraries, and actually make something fully functional and (somewhat) useful. I couldn’t believe it! I was happy on one side, and angry on the other, because NOBODY ever taught us about Java or about creating an useful application.

The Ph.D. Student who was appointed to help us with the project told us: “That’s the way it works, it’s normal that you don’t know Java, but you know a bit of C++, and now it’s time to research”. That was again very shocking: it was the first time that someone ever told me something like this, and in the end we agreed on the project.

Despite the fact we had to implement some new features and test them relatively at the last minute, we succeeded in developing the program. In particular, I actually played an important part being the one who actually researched something on Java already, and knew more about programming.

Oddly enough, my collegue would have graduated with a higher mark than me, even if he originally thought that “SSH” was nothing but a sound used to shut people up and that HTML was a proprietary standard introduced by Microsoft having something to do with web pages. If you’re reading all this mate, don’t get angry at me: I have nothing against you, I just hate the System, as usual.

He still probabally thinks that POP3 is something like the name of a band and that a shell can be found only at the sea. Mate, it’s not your fault, don’t blame me if I say this, blame the System!

I mean, I don’t consider myself an expert, but at least I’m better than that. I met students, at uni, who haven’t the faintest idea of what a sever was. And that’s pretty sad, if you ask me.

Let’s now come to the end of this apparently endless flow of thoughts: I still had an exam to pass in order to get the degree. Such exam counts 3/180 of the whole stuff we had to study in these three years (it is literally quantified like this on paper), and it’s about Digital Controls. Cool, you may think, but it actually means MORE mathematical models to solve complex(?) situations, more theorems and other crap, even if — I admit — I had to take exams worse than this one.

I admit I constantly underestimated the exam and took it various times without passing it: “it’s so small, I’ll have to pass it eventually”.

This was just the way of thinking they made us adopt, nothing more, nothing less.

I was quite busy testing my program and writing the thesis in this period, although we were literally told not to worry too much about it: “just google a bit on the net, copy and paste, and change some words if you feel guilty…”

To the guy who told me to do so: it’s just an example that is bad to read, but it’s true, you can’t deny it. I don’t blame you, because you’ve really taught me a lot about working on “proper” projects (and this is NOT sarcastic, really), I blame the System.

In the meantime I spent days running around here and there trying to sort out all the bureaucracy necessary to have all the papers ready for my degree, and I also talked to the professor who commissioned the project: he’s by far the most helpful and altruistic professor I’ve ever met, and obviously offered his complete availability for helping
us for the preparation of the degree.

I just needed to pass my last exam. It was the last one, not as complex as others I took, and this time I studied more than the previous times…

I didn’t pass it.

I don’t blame the professor, because probably he’s the only one who’s normal in the whole lot: he’s like me, I think, because I suspect he’s aware that abroad students don’t cheat and professors are not “flexible” on marks. I got 12/30, and I didn’t pass, that was it, I didn’t know his subject enough and he didn’t feel he had to help me to get the degree at all. And he’s right. I can’t blame him, but I DO blame such a “flexible” system which in the end is totally absurd. I learnt the hard way that I shouldn’t have “trusted” the Italian Way, because it has flaws.

Oddly enough, people who can’t even connect a network cable get their B.Sc., and all I get after spending months learning useful things and developing is just a load of B.S.

I learnt my lesson and I’ll probably re-take the exam, pass it, and maybe get the degree: my collegue and friend just emailed me telling me that I HAVE to help him doing the missing chapters of the thesis because he can’t write them, he’s not good at writing stuff, and doesn’t know what to write either. He’ll get his B.Sc. on September 23rd, provided that I actually decide to help him.

I hope people who read this can understand my frustration apart from blaming me for being “lazy” when it came to exams and expecting help when technically I didn’t deserve it. I probably won’t win the nobel prize or get rich like those two american students who own the most profitable Internet business ever conceivable. I’m not as special, and I don’t deserve anything special, and I never dreamt about it.

All I dreamt was being able to learn, and do something useful. It looks like it will remain just a dream, here in Italy.