Let’s start from the basics: can you introduce yourself?

Hello! I’m Edoardo, in my thirties, born near Milan (Italy) and raised in the Alps of the same region, to escape the boredom of too flat a horizon. I studied physics, first in Milan, then abroad in Switzerland, where I spent a little over four years on a PhD that convinced me academic research wasn’t for me – or so I thought, since I didn’t stray too far. In the following years I became a “research software engineer”, meaning a software developer who works closely with research. It took me a while to realize that, despite the many benefits, that work had become a routine I was taking too much for granted. Or better: I had lost sight of why I was staying there; why I kept choosing that configuration for my life. Now I’m trying to figure out if teaching the two subjects I’m most passionate about – math and physics – is what I want to do in the next chapter of my career.

I can never get enough of hiking in the mountains, especially over multiple days – as long as my body agrees. And sharing an experience with other people who love the same thing is my ideal vacation. Books, writing – I don’t know how many experiments with novels and short stories I’ve done over the years – and puzzles of all kinds (including programming challenges, even though I’m a particularly slow coder) are some of the activities that can easily fill my free time.

What’s the story behind your blog?

Having always loved tinkering with computers, I think I started writing random things online quite early. If I remember correctly, it was on LiveJournal or MySpace, prehistoric stuff now. I discovered WordPress during high school, following a guy from my same school who wrote ironic essays on philosophy topics. I tried to emulate that model, but I didn’t get very far as it wasn’t my thing. Years later, with some friends fond of cinema, again on WordPress, I started a collective blog where we wrote our opinions on the movies we watched, often together. The name of the blog – Sweet Sue and Her Society Syncopators – was a tribute to a classic 50s American comedy. (I’ll let you work that one out.)

During my PhD, I collaborated on and managed the university cinema club’s blog. At the time, however, I also started publishing my very personal ideas on books and movies on another blog, whose name or domain I honestly don’t even remember now. I think I tried to recover something from that blog via the Wayback Machine, with no success.

Fast-forward several years, I realized why none of those blogs had survived: I was writing on commission – I loved the perk of press screenings, but writing something afterwards was non-negotiable. Or I was performing for some imagined audience by covering whatever was trending, not what I actually cared about. I could say that my personal blog was born when I decided that my online space would be only a public personal journal: the only rule was to write about what interested me the most, in the way that felt most natural. This is still the reason behind my current blog. How long is it going to survive? I don’t know. It did well, so far, with ups and downs.

What does your creative process look like when it comes to blogging?

Beyond my hiking recaps, almost everything I write starts from curiosity – a science-based question (“if I ate an apple a day for a year, how many kg of peel could I accumulate?”), something I want to understand well enough to explain, a brain teaser that sometimes keeps me awake. Since it’s often something I don’t know, a research phase almost always follows – and I admit that, sometimes, it derails my intention to write. I keep a dedicated note for each idea, where I track its evolution. When I feel like I’ve reached a conclusion of sorts, I then sketch out a structure and use it as a guide for the first draft. Curiously, all my notes are in English, but the first draft of anything I write is always in Italian. Then I translate into English, and very often rewrite some parts that don’t flow very well in the other language. And yes, I often use Claude for a final proofread: I’ve given it strict instructions on what it can and can’t touch, and how. The content is always mine, and I’m careful to keep it that way: I don’t want to end up with a voice I no longer recognize as my own.

As for the tools, my personal notes live in an Obsidian vault – because they must be plain text files – and I write all my drafts almost exclusively in iA Writer. It’s been my first choice for many writing projects, at least in their early stages. One feature I particularly love is its support for authorship, without violating the plain text pact.

Do you have an ideal creative environment? Also do you believe the physical space influences your creativity?

When I sit down to write the first draft, I have only one need: to be alone in a fairly quiet environment. Honestly, I’ve never tried writing in a public place, like a café – and the few times I did write on a train, it was surely due to a deadline I couldn’t avoid.

As far as I’m concerned, it’s more the act of moving through space that stimulates what I might call creative thinking – which I take to mean authentic rather than original, as in “totally new”. And I’m also convinced that the environment influences my creativity, but I couldn’t say how or why. Often I’ve only realized much later that I had visited an environment from which I returned with ideas I considered creative – whether these didn’t go very far is another, unresolved story.

A question for the techie readers: can you run us through your tech stack?

I think I’ve tried dozens of frameworks to create a blog, starting with the large family of static-site generators. After several attempts, intrigued by some input from Manu, I gave Kirby a chance and discovered that it met all my needs. One above all: my blog’s content must be in plain text, as I don’t want to deal with any kind of problem taking it with me, wherever it might be in the future. So, for the moment: Kirby CMS, hosted on a fairly basic server managed by Hetzner. The domain is registered on Porkbun, and the DNS is managed by Cloudflare. I’ve also written a dozen custom plugins to tweak many aspects of my website because, for me, tinkering with the mechanics of a personal blog is part of the joy of having one. I just can’t resist – and I keep telling myself “tinker less, write more”.

Given your experience, if you were to start a blog today, would you do anything differently?

I would probably study web design and web technologies properly from the start – I mostly stumbled into this stuff through my day job. I say this to avoid having to settle for some preconfigured service that isn’t right for me.

I would love to have a domain like firstname.blog, but the problem isn’t availability so much as the popularity of my name. And, honestly, I’m not ready to pay $200 a year for a personal website.

Financial question since the Web is obsessed with money: how much does it cost to run your blog? Is it just a cost, or does it generate some revenue? And what’s your position on people monetising personal blogs?

The maintenance costs for my blog are quite low: 4€ and something a month for the server, plus the annual cost of the domain – about 20€. Kirby CMS requires a one-time license (100€, renewed every four years), and this is the only expense I periodically re-evaluate: the moment it no longer aligns with my needs, I will have no problem planning a migration elsewhere. In fact, I’ve already done it several times as a stress test, but for now I don’t feel the need to.

My website generates no revenue, nor have I ever tried to make it do so. Personally, I have nothing against monetising a personal website, provided it’s done honestly. If I were to do it, I probably wouldn’t rely on platforms like Substack – only because I like building things myself. Even today I financially support some blogs because I believe in the work of the people behind them – or to give a friend a small nudge to keep going.

Time for some recommendations: any blog you think is worth checking out? And also, who do you think I should be interviewing next?

A good part of the blogs I follow, or like to return to from time to time, I discovered thanks to “People & Blogs” – or through “Ye Olde Blogroll”. I think it’s unlikely that anyone reading this page doesn’t know either of them; but if that’s the case, I invite you to take a look, exploring even the older, less obvious stuff.

I want to mention a friend’s project, halfway between a personal blog and a photography portfolio, that I had the pleasure of contributing to. I’m very fond of it: partly for my friendship with the author, and partly because it circles a theme that has quietly followed me for years: the sense of belonging to a place, or to multiple places; the idea, the concept, the experience of what we call home. The project is “Stay Stay Stay” by Elettra Pistoni: if you’re not into reading about this topic, her pictures are well worth a look. I also think she would more than gladly welcome the opportunity for this interview, but I’ll leave the decision to those in charge.

I’ve lost count of how many newsletters or feeds I’ve subscribed to over the years, and it doesn’t really matter. I’ve reached the point where the list of online content I follow consistently has no more than ten items. Among these, two blogs and a newsletter (in Italian) that I return to quite regularly, even to reread older things:

• “Useful Fictions” by Cate Hall
• Julia Evans’s blog, a trove for tech enthusiasts
• The newsletter “It’s Friday I’m (not) in love”, partly inspired by “Modern Love”, the New York Times’ well-known column.

Final question: is there anything you want to share with us?

I’ll take this as a cue to share a bit of what’s going through my head – two thoughts and a side project that will maybe see the light someday.

• Whenever I feel like telling someone “I don’t have time”, I stop and remind myself that it’s almost never true. In fact, never. It’s just my fear of making a commitment, or a lack of courage to admit what I really care about. I try never to hide behind this excuse with the people I really care about, because they don’t deserve it. I’ve also written a short post about it.
• This could be one of my guiding tenets, because I haven’t been able to refute it yet: “Actions, not words, reveal our real values”. It’s not mine, and I often struggle to accept it myself. But I’m convinced that if we actually lived by it, we would have far more genuine and satisfying relationships with other people – in whatever sense you want to take that.
• Being a hiker obsessed with traveling light, I started working on an app (web only to begin with) that lets me keep track of my gear and which items I decide to bring on each trip. Dozens of these tools already exist, but this is my vision of what I’d want such an app to do. I called it “Baseweight”, and I hope to have an alpha version out in the near future. If someone is curious, the app’s future home will be at baseweight.my. And if you’d like to share your thoughts on it, don’t hesitate to reach out! Opinions and suggestions are especially welcome at this early stage.

Finally, a heartfelt thanks to Manu for offering me the opportunity to share a bit of myself with this community!