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About

Hi, I'm Federico Thiella.

whoami

IT Specialist & Data Engineer. I build data automation with Python & SQL.

Core Philosophy

  • Simple solutions > Over-engineering
  • Automate repetitive tasks (If it takes >5 min, script it)
  • Good API design & Consistent Interfaces
  • Best practices & Elegant code

Toolbox & Preferences

  • CLI, Dark Mode, Fixed-width fonts
  • Python (Pandas, API Integration, Scraping)
  • SQL (PostgreSQL, Data Cleaning)
  • Sublime Text, Total Commander, Cmder

Foundations (Under The Hood)

  • C / C++ (Memory management & Pointers awareness)
  • ASM (x86 Architecture basics)
  • Build Systems & Compilation Process

Influences

  • Joel Spolsky (Software Management)
  • Cal Newport (Deep Work)
  • Mark Russinovich (Windows Internals)
  • Nicholas Carr (The Shallows)

Likes

  • mynoise.net (Focus)
  • Technical Documentation (RTFM)
  • The Secret of Monkey Island (Culture)
  • The guitar and music trackers (ModEdit, FastTracker II, Sound Blaster)

Dislikes

  • Comic Sans
  • Inefficiency

Projects

  • filtersql — a SQL query compiler with multi-tenant scope and column whitelisting. It started as a tiny bug that turned out to be an architectural problem: I wrote about it here.
  • adminer-plugin-dump-markdown — an Adminer plugin that exports tables and queries to Markdown, ready to paste into an email, a blog post, or a document.
  • Document RAG (internal project) — a retrieval-augmented generation system over roughly 30,000 public sector documents. They weren't freely available, so I collected, cleaned and cataloged them with my own scripts, OCR'd them with a custom pipeline, tagged them via AI APIs, and finally made them searchable both with classic search and with an LLM. Stack: Python, PostgreSQL with pgvector. No link: the documents and the infrastructure aren't mine.
  • SQL::Textify — a Perl module to run SQL queries from the command line and get results in Markdown, HTML or JSON.
  • Sql-mk-builder — the older version of SQL::Textify, integrable with Sublime Text.
  • A few more on GitHub.

This blog

Notes on SQL, Python, Perl, shell, Windows scripting; a few thoughts on security, data and the scientific method; and the occasional post about a bug that taught me something.

Some of the posts come from my old blog weRock.it, active from 2009 to 2013. I kept the ones that aged better, or the ones that tell how we used to work back then.

I don't write often. I write when I have the time and something worth keeping.

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