Barbieri Notes Francesco Barbieri's Blog

It seems like everyone in the tech industry goes through a blogging phase. This is the beginning of mine.

What’s the blog about?

Inspired by my guiding principle of “I want to do cool things” this blog will cover mostly reflections about big ideas - mostly in tech but not only.

 
I’ll try to publish posts that will remain relevant and valuable over a long period of time. I want to address questions or issues that are unlikely to become outdated anytime soon. For this reason and to keep the writing quality high, the publishing rate will be very low. I suggest you to subscribe to the RSS feed.

Why a blog?

Blogging can play a crucial role in exploring and, more importantly, sharing cool ideas possibily igniting some debates, wich are a mechanism for society to self-correct, innovate and evolve. If you ever want to reach out to me, you can do so on X. My DMs and the reply section are always open for an interesting chat.

 
I would still like to give credit to the article “You should write blogs” by Steve Yegge, and many of Paul Graham’s essays.

Why your website is so minimal?

I think the Internet has become a bloated mess. Huge JavaScript libraries and frameworks increase client-side load, reducing performances, and many elements like animations, fonts and images, are often unnecessary. This is very far from the Internet early days priciples.

 
As someone who has always appreciated the unfortunately now rare feeling of a fast and optimized website, I began questioning myself if this trend was the right direction to take for my own site. Unsurprisingly, it wasn’t.

 
Instead, I decided to adopt a content-first approach for my website, where trendy elements that lose appeal quickly won’t be rendered on your screen.

 
As a collateral benefit, this blog has proudly joined the 512kb Club, a collection of high-performance and optimized websites.

What is the tech stack?

After a bit of research I found that Astro was the perfect framework for this project.

Why no dark mode?

Maybe it will come in a future update, but for now I like a clean and light theme.