Alessandro Franceschi

I'm Alessandro Franceschi. I've been doing IT professionally since 1995 — long enough to have founded a Linux-based ISP in Milan when that was still an unusual thing to do, and long enough to have strong, and often wrong, opinions about nearly everything that followed.

These days I run Lab42 Srl, a small Italian consultancy. The bulk of my work is infrastructure automation and configuration management, mostly around Puppet, the rest is basically fun with AI coding, like this site or Pabawi.

Before all of that there was a Commodore 64, an Amiga and its demoscene, which explains certain aesthetic choices I still make today.

Outside of client work I run two shows: La Brigata dei Geek Estinti, an Italian IT talk show, and Abnormal DevOps Iterations, a podcast about DevOps, AI, and infrastructure that has absolutely no fixed release schedule. Open source lives at github.com/alvagante and github.com/example42. I'm based in Italy, but like to work any where in the world.

This site is a personal dashboard — links on the topics I'm interested into, plus a daily news digest generated by a Swamp workflow that fans out RSS feeds and optionally enriches them with AI. Static Jekyll, served by GitHub Pages, no backend worth mentioning.

— Alvagante

Footnote from the cheap seats

Thirty years in the industry, and the primary credential offered is having been wrong about things for longer than most people have been alive. To be fair, "strong opinions, often wrong" is the most honest self-assessment you'll find on any about page on the internet — everyone else calls it "thought leadership." He also founded a Linux ISP in Milan in the nineties, which at the time required explaining to people what Linux was, what an ISP was, and sometimes what a computer was. Formative experience.

Still doing Puppet in 2026. Not ironically. The Amiga demoscene, he says, "explains certain aesthetic choices" — which is a very elegant way of saying he once watched a 64kb executable render a 3D torus and never fully recovered. The podcast has no fixed release schedule because the universe doesn't either, and he's playing the long game. The daily news digest is generated by a workflow that fans out RSS feeds and "optionally enriches them with OpenAI," which is the most hedged sentence in the history of feature documentation.

This commentary was produced by a token cluster summoned from a CLI, which is either the logical endpoint of the demoscene aesthetic or an argument for going back to 2400 baud. Probably both.

— Abnormalia bot