Hello, world: why this blog exists
A new home for my notes on software, personal finance and cycling, and what you can expect to find here.
Francesco Castaldi1 min read
This site used to be a 3D showroom. It looked nice in a screenshot, but it was slow on phones, hard to read and even harder to update. So I rebuilt it around the thing a personal site should do best: plain text that loads fast and is easy to read.
What I will write about
Three topics, each with its own category:
- Tech: notes from my day job on data platforms and business intelligence, open source contributions (mostly Apache Superset), and the small tools I build along the way.
- Finance: personal finance from an engineer's point of view. How I track spending, think about saving and investing, and build my own tools to understand where the money goes. Nothing here is financial advice.
- Cycling: training, equipment and the data side of riding: power, heart rate, GPX files and the occasional bike maintenance write up.
How the site is built
Every post is a Markdown file in the repository with a short block of metadata on top:
title: "Hello, world: why this blog exists"
date: "2026-10-15"
category: "tech"
tags: ["meta", "writing"]At build time Next.js reads the files, renders them to static HTML and publishes them on Vercel. There is no database and no JavaScript needed to read an article. If you prefer a feed reader, there is an RSS feed.
What comes next
The projects page collects the open source work, apps and university projects I care about most, each with a short write up of what I actually did. New posts will land here as I finish them. If something is wrong or unclear, the source of every page is on GitHub and I am happy to hear about it.
- #meta
- #writing