Itadinanta is a Sardinian slang word which can be roughly translated to “thingamajig”, and it’s usually used as a humourous placeholder for “that bloody thing” when one doesn’t remember the thing’s name. The word was at the core of a running joke between colleagues years ago, at Energit, when, right at the last legs of the dotcom boom, a small group of us toyed with the idea of defecting as a separate startup “to do stuff”. What kind of stuff exactly we really had no idea, hence the name “Itadinanta”. For fun, we put together some spare change to buy a domain name just to have a mailbox with “itadinanta.it” in its address.
Needless to say the startup never saw the light of day, and we almost (if not for Facebook) lost track of each other. Water under bridges and all, however, I became attached to the domain name and to the joke it sprouted from, and even more than fifteen years and a country later I still own the domain name (now it’s “itadinanta.net”, welcome globalization!) and still enjoy the name for my own, erm, what’s that thing again?
Jokes aside, nowadays “itadinanta” keeps the original meaning and becomes the moniker for an umbrella covering my personal tech ramblings, which may or may not include code which doesn’t crash at startup and actually does something beneficial for the community at large. In 2018, it involves experimenting in Rust, image processing and computer vision, A-life and procedurally generated content.
I’ve also got strong interests with regard to Scala and the JVM, Erlang, functional programming, distributed systems, herding cats (aka “distributed team operational management”) and generally any technique which makes building large and reliable systems a sane endeavour.
I’ve got a few active projects under this umbrella:
- rust-oids: experimenting with A-life (Rust)
- gfx-gtk: Simple bridge between gfx-rs and gtk-rs
- ofx-rs: OpenFX 1.4 API wrapper
and a bunch of inactive/historical projects:
- rnkr (reads: ranker). A leaderboard service for videogames (Scala)
- spring-scala: a fork of the original springsource project to extend support to scala 2.11 (Scala)
- tunebait: 2012, Android game prototype built on libGdx (Java)
- eurofattu: 2002? Invoicing webapp, generates printout via LaTeX (php)
- lightcms: 2004? Self-contained multi-site static content manager (Java)
- onthefly: 2003, OpenGL-based swarming A-life tech demo (C++)
- worm: 2005?, non photorealistic rendering of dynamically defined objects (C++, shader asm)
- emufxtool: 2008? DSP assembler/disassembler targeting the SB Emu10k1 sound chip via ALSA (C++)
Enjoy!
Nico