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I live in Rotterdam with two amazing ladies, one of them quite small. I like it here. Rotterdam has a special place in my heart because I've spent my student years here. It is the kind of city you can keep discovering. I believe my partner also likes it, even though it is of course nothing like her home town Rome. The little one ejoys the many playgrounds around here and is obsessed with riding the metro, which stops right at our doorstep.
My work as an academic is a big part of my life (I have to be honest). I currently work as an assistant professor at the department of Public Administration and Sociology of the Erasmus University Rotterdam, which also happens to be the place where I did my studies and my PhD (I did some postdocs in Delft and Manchester in the meantime). I am fascinated by governance (as in: processes in which public and private actors have to coordinate around complex societal issues), particularly when it concerns the governance of transformations towards sustainability. I also spend a lot of time thinking about and working on methods to study complex social processes. A major project of mine in the past years has been to write a dedicated software suite for that, about which I have written some blog posts on my http page:
You'll notice that the page has not seen a post in 2-3 years (no longer true), which is more or less the age of my daughter (you are connecting the dots, right?). It is something I hope to change soon, but Gemini is not helping with that.
That brings me to another, smaller aspect of my life: I am a Linux enthusiast. This started somewhere in 2012. I made a three month research visit to China and felt incredibly lonely most of the time that I was there. To keep my mind occupied, I decided to pick up something that I always felt drawn towards, but never came around to trying before: Writing code. I initially taught myself to work with Aquamacs (some kind of Mac-oriented flavour of emacs?) as an IDE, but at some point decided things be much easier if I would switch to Linux. The first Linux distribution that I tried (and ended up using for a loooong time) was Ubuntu. At some point I switched from Ubuntu to Debian, and recently I made the switch to ArcoLinux, with dwm as my window manager (and I am happy I did). My love for emacs hasn't waned, and it grew even stronger once I started using Doom emacs. However, I also like to spend time in vim, which I am using to write this text. One reason why I started using Doom emacs is its evil-mode. The vim-keybindings somehow make more sense to me.
During the covid pandemic lockdowns I have developed a workflow that never requires me to log out of my beloved Linux OS. Since my university recently switched to Office365, I can easily access my files from a web browser and there is plenty of simple Word and Excel editing stuff that I can do in a browser as well. If that isn't enough, I just spin up a virtual machine that has the Office365 suite installed. I use Doom emacs for my work email (mu4e), my agenda and to-do lists (org-mode; I use a python script to download my Outlook calendar in an org-mode format every now and then), my notes on projects and papers (org-roam, org-noter, org-roam-bibtex), presentations (org-mode and beamer) and writing papers and other texts (org-mode and org-ref). Of course, I cannot avoid Office365 software entirely, since I do a lot of my work in collaboration with others. Here I am rambling about work again.
I recently discovered Gemini, thanks to Youtube videos of HexDSL and DistroTube. I think it took me about half a day to decide that I wanted a capsule of my own; my own little spot in Gemini space. And here it is.