Latest Posts (20 found)
Tara's Website 3 weeks ago

It’s not that I like COBOL. I like software that leaves me alone.

It’s not that I like COBOL. I like software that leaves me alone. If my friends and acquaintances are mistaking me at this point for the illegitimate niece of Grace Hopper, I probably can’t blame them. Someone recently sent me some retro-computing material starting with something along the lines of “as you’re the niece of Grace Hopper”, and given how much COBOL has appeared in my recent experiments, I can understand where that came from.

programming Programming career Career
0 views
Tara's Website 1 months ago

Programs are guests. Guests still need a house.

Programs are guests. Guests still need a house. I had this article in mind for a few months. While I was researching Project Quiet Ground and the IBM 5280, my friend Matteo shared this blog article with me: https://dmitrybrant.com/2026/02/01/defeating-a-40-year-old-copy-protection-dongle Long story short, Dmitry Brant describes how he defeated a mid-1980s copy-protection dongle to make an old RPG compiler for DOS work again today. It is an excellent piece of software archaeology, and his reverse-engineering work alone is well worth reading.

programming Programming hardware Hardware security Security
0 views
Tara's Website 1 months ago

Summer 2026 season updates

Summer 2026 season updates I am looking out of the window of my hotel room. The sun is setting earlier by the day, which means that summer is slowly preparing to give way to a new season. But it is still very hot. This year, a heatwave hit most of Europe, with unusual temperatures in London and even in Innsbruck, where it reached 37°C, something I don’t remember ever happening there.

Science
0 views
Tara's Website 2 months ago

SeaweedFS, FreeBSD and a rather deep rabbit hole

SeaweedFS, FreeBSD and a rather deep rabbit hole At this point, reading my blog, you could be forgiven for thinking that I have become entirely about IBM midrange systems, COBOL and offline-first computing. That is still true, in a way. I genuinely enjoy those things. But I am still very much attracted to large, complex architectures, distributed systems, and the sort of infrastructure where several apparently innocent design decisions eventually turn into a whiteboard covered in arrows.

database Database devops DevOps
0 views
Tara's Website 2 months ago

Cobolito/400: a tiny data appliance in the IBM 5280 lineage

Cobolito/400: a tiny data appliance in the IBM 5280 lineage I wrote an essay about Cobolito/400, a tiny data appliance built as a tribute to the IBM 5280 and to a style of computing where records, screens, media, and operators still had visible relationships with each other. At the beginning, it was meant to be a blog post. But somewhere between Scottish biscuits and a cup of tea, I got carried away and wrote almost 90 pages instead.

programming Programming data Data
0 views
Tara's Website 3 months ago

GixSQL, COBOL and FreeBSD

GixSQL, COBOL and FreeBSD This is more of a small bookmark for my own sake, rather than a full article. I created a tiny repository with working GnuCOBOL, GixSQL and SQLite examples: gnucobol-gixsql-sqlite-examples It is intentionally small. There is one SELECT example, one INSERT example, a tiny SQLite schema, a Makefile, and some notes about the things that were harder to discover than I expected. Not a framework, not a full tutorial, not a polished “this is how you should do it” document.

programming Programming
0 views
Tara's Website 4 months ago

Spring 2026 updates

Spring 2026 updates Servus from … a random hotel. I’m sitting cross-legged on the bed in my pyjamas, laptop on my legs. Mx Liebe is sitting beside me, a reminder that he is part of my portable home. I glance outside the window. The sun is starting to set, that small daily proof that the days are getting longer. Outside there is a large walled lorry park, all its lights turned on: a safe place for drivers to spend the night before entering their final destination.

culture Culture writing Writing journalism Journalism java Java
0 views
Tara's Website 7 months ago

Flying solo

Flying Solo One of the things I like most when I fly solo is having all the space to myself. The back seats are usually filled with my backpack and jacket, while the right seat holds my iPad, navigation charts, kneeboard, a bottle of water, and occasionally some snacks for longer (and sometimes boring?) flights. Not much different from how I travel by car. After handling take-off procedures and settling into cruise, I love relaxing and watching the landscape in comfortable silence, just the engine’s hum and the soft background chatter of the radio.

Travel Personal Aviation
0 views
Tara's Website 7 months ago

Flight record about MinIO

Flight record about MinIO I wanted to leave a small flight record for my future self about what happened to MinIO. By the time I reread this, it will be old news. That is fine. This is less about the timeline and more about what it reminded me about my own preferences. I recently wrote about a data-first view of systems, where programs are transient and data is the center of gravity.

devops DevOps open-source Open Source data Data
0 views
Tara's Website 8 months ago

Data first, programs as guests

Data first, programs as guests Some ideas don’t arrive suddenly. They form slowly, through repetition and exposure, until one day they become visible. Over the years, I’ve noticed that the systems I’ve always felt most at home in share a specific trait. It took me a long time to see the bigger picture and name it clearly. In those systems, data is the center of gravity, not programs. Programs are transient.

data Data
0 views
Tara's Website 9 months ago

Quietly Here

Quietly Here It’s Christmas Eve here at the offline outpost. I’ve put on one of those classical YouTube Christmas videos, the kind that can play forever. A wooden cabin, a Christmas tree, a sofa with a cat, two large windows. Outside, mountains and softly falling snow. A lake in front of the cabin, and the lights of other cabins around it, as if to say: we’re quietly here too. Beside the TV, there’s a real, smaller Christmas tree, with lights and a few simple decorations.

culture Culture entertainment Entertainment writing Writing
0 views
Tara's Website 10 months ago

Sustainability and responsible computing

Sustainability and responsible computing When we talk about sustainability in computing, the conversation often stops at datacenters, power usage effectiveness, and renewable energy sources. Those things matter, of course. But sustainability doesn’t start in a power plant or a cooling system. It starts much earlier, at the moment we design software. Responsible computing also means asking how much we actually need. Less CPU cycles. Less memory pressure. Less data moved, stored, replicated, forgotten.

ai AI devops DevOps
0 views
Tara's Website 10 months ago

(very) late autumn 2025 update

(very) late autumn 2025 update Servus from Tara’s offline outpost! We reached -6°C in the past days here and a dash of snow appeared. Nothing compared to the -12°C and the amount of snow I witnessed a few days ago in the Garmisch-Partenkirchen area. Beautiful… but… better experienced from the car! Even the UI of the car wasn’t able to display that temperature properly: the minus sign overlapped with another widget on the display.

gaming Gaming programming Programming Electronics
0 views
Tara's Website 10 months ago

A Love Letter to FreeBSD

A Love Letter to FreeBSD Dear FreeBSD, I’m still the new person here, learning your ways, stumbling over the occasional quirk, smiling when I find the small touches that make you different. You remind me of what computing felt like before the noise. Before hype cycles and performance theatre. Before every tool needed a plugin system and a logo. You are coherent. You are deliberate. You are the kind of system that doesn’t have to shout to belong.

open-source Open Source
0 views
Tara's Website 11 months ago

On Debian, Rust, and the Unix Spirit

On Debian, Rust, and the Unix Spirit An article by Giorgio Rutigliano crossed my feed this week - Debian e Rust - written in Italian, thoughtful and well-argued, describing how Debian is embracing Rust more deeply in its toolchain and base system. You can read it here. Even if you don’t read Italian, the message comes through: from my understanding, Debian wants to bring Rust from the edges to the heart.

programming Programming rust Rust
0 views
Tara's Website 1 years ago

End of Summer 2025 Updates

End of Summer 2025 Updates Servus from Tara’s offline outpost. I wanted to write this post as a mid-summer update… but here we are 🤷‍♀️ The beginning of summer was quite… bumpy. As you might have guessed from a previous post, I am no longer working for the global telecommunications company. That chapter closed in early June, and I decided to give myself space to focus on my other big passion: aviation.

writing Writing career Career
0 views
Tara's Website 1 years ago

Bright Spot in the Logbook

Bright Spot in the Logbook After a couple of months in my hiatus to focus on flying and staying current with my pilot duties, there’s a little thing I want to share. Every so often, someone in aviation says something that stays with me far longer than they might expect. Recently, a senior training captain of a famous airline asked me: “Why don’t you continue your passion and make it your career?

career Career
0 views
Tara's Website 1 years ago

Kubernetes on Bare Metal or VMs?

Kubernetes on Bare Metal or VMs? Preface Lately, I’ve been asked the same question by an international bank in London, a trading firm in Switzerland, and a startup in Finland: should Kubernetes live on bare metal or inside virtual machines? Each is finding its own way through the jungle of infrastructure modernization, and all have ended up asking versions of the same thing. After repeating these conversations enough times to start hearing echoes, I figured it might be useful to share my perspective more widely.

devops DevOps cloud Cloud
0 views
Tara's Website 1 years ago

From Clouds to Classics: Revisiting IBM i

From Clouds to Classics: Revisiting IBM i As I enjoy a short hiatus to focus on flying and staying current with my pilot duties, somewhere between jobs and between flight lessons, I’ve found myself drawn back to the kind of engineering that first made me fall in love with computing. Not by plan. Just a slow gravitational pull toward clarity. Lately, that’s meant diving back into IBM i (formerly AS/400), and letting myself rediscover what made it special, and why it still speaks to me.

database Database
0 views
Tara's Website 1 years ago

Exploring Open Source Vendor Cooperation

Introduction A couple of months ago, I had an insightful conversation with my former manager, the Cloud Director of a major European telecom company. In that moment, I metaphorically swapped my “employee” hat for my “strategic consultant” hat, the same one I wear when I first engage with clients to discuss their open source strategy. I explained to him the various ways a company might approach open source, especially if it decides to partner with a vendor.

cloud Cloud open-source Open Source business Business
0 views