rebtoor

rants from a greybeard

Last week I was in Bologna (hands down my favorite Italian city) for Cloud Native Days Italy 2026, a two-day conference centered around cloud native and everything that revolves around it.

The conference followed a very precise schedule: keynotes, talks, and lightning talks (many of which were sponsored) interspersed with coffee breaks and lunch.

The venue

Once again this year, the conference took place at the Savoia Hotel Regency congress center, and I can't help but appreciate it. The environment is spacious and bright on the inside, and outside you can relax by the pool or surrounded by greenery. The lunch and coffee breaks were also wonderful. We are in Bologna after all, aren't we?

Sponsor and community area

AKA gadget gathering!

Jokes aside, it was an excellent opportunity for networking and getting to know products and initiatives from companies and communities. Without going into detail about all the conversations I had, I just want to mention the folks from https://www.greensoftwareitalia.org because I believe their work is essential at a time like this.

In any case, the t-shirts, socks, bottle openers, keychains, hat, and lego sets were highly appreciated. :p

The talks

This is the list of talks I attended, along with a few comments:

Day 1

Day 2

Takeaways

The conference talks were generally of excellent quality, and I am very glad that AI-themed talks did not monopolize the entire event, leaving room for topics that are, IMO, more interesting. The organizers did a great job from every perspective, and I was truly happy to have participated. I met colleagues and former colleagues, chatted about interesting topics, ate well, and I even won a CNCF voucher because I left the most feedback on the talks! :D

If I had to nitpick, I would say I'd like to see a lot more care taken to avoid completely AI-generated slides (sigh) and more effort to engage the community through open standards (the fediverse) rather than relying on the usual commercial social networks or messaging systems with questionable security standards. But that's another story.

See you on May 20, 2027, for the next edition!

I decided to start blogging again while I was having lunch on the last day of a conference [^1] I attended. I was thrilled by almost everything I saw and heard there, so I felt the urge to start writing about it.

I've lost faith in social networks long time ago and the only social network I'm still in doesn't deserve any structured thought because of its enshittification.

I spent several days thinking about where and how to start blogging again; I excluded Medium because of their paywall, I haven't considered not even for a second Substack and/or any other walled garden that forces users to subscribe, pay, or download an app to read a bunch of characters that could be easily read on a toaster[^2].

And above all: none of those solutions are free software which is a huge nope for me.

I spent a lot of time fighting against Wordpress so I gave up years ago, Ghost seems oriented to professional writers and GitHub pages, well, thanks but no thanks.

I've heard about WriteFreely on the fediverse, when I still had a presence there, but since I didn't want to selfhost or register an account on an instance that might disappear the next day, i refused to consider it.

And here comes write.as (which, my fault, i never considered despite they are the WriteFreely developers!) that will host my bad written thoughts if I will be consistent.

Kudos to the team!

[^1] Pycon IT, I'll talk about it. [^2] IYKYK, and in that case, congratulations! You're old!

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