Hello! I'm Edoardo, in my thirties, born near Milan (Italy) and raised in the Alps of the same region, to escape the boredom of too flat a horizon. I studied physics, first in Milan, then abroad in Switzerland, where I spent a little over four years on a PhD that convinced me academic research wasn't for me – or so I thought, since I didn't stray too far. In the following years I became a "research software engineer", meaning a software developer who works closely with research. It took me a while to realize that, despite the many benefits, that work had become a routine I was taking too much for granted. Or better: I had lost sight of why I was staying there; why I kept choosing that configuration for my life. Now I'm trying to figure out if teaching the two subjects I'm most passionate about – math and physics – is what I want to do in the next chapter of my career. I can never get enough of hiking in the mountains, especially over multiple days – as long as my body agrees. And sharing an experience with other people who love the same thing is my ideal vacation. Books, writing – I don't know how many experiments with novels and short stories I've done over the years – and puzzles of all kinds (including programming challenges, even though I'm a particularly slow coder) are some of the activities that can easily fill my free time. Having always loved tinkering with computers, I think I started writing random things online quite early. If I remember correctly, it was on LiveJournal or MySpace, prehistoric stuff now. I discovered WordPress during high school, following a guy from my same school who wrote ironic essays on philosophy topics. I tried to emulate that model, but I didn't get very far as it wasn't my thing. Years later, with some friends fond of cinema, again on WordPress, I started a collective blog where we wrote our opinions on the movies we watched, often together. The name of the blog – Sweet Sue and Her Society Syncopators – was a tribute to a classic 50s American comedy. (I'll let you work that one out.) During my PhD, I collaborated on and managed the university cinema club's blog. At the time, however, I also started publishing my very personal ideas on books and movies on another blog, whose name or domain I honestly don't even remember now. I think I tried to recover something from that blog via the Wayback Machine, with no success. Fast-forward several years, I realized why none of those blogs had survived: I was writing on commission – I loved the perk of press screenings, but writing something afterwards was non-negotiable. Or I was performing for some imagined audience by covering whatever was trending, not what I actually cared about. I could say that my personal blog was born when I decided that my online space would be only a public personal journal: the only rule was to write about what interested me the most, in the way that felt most natural. This is still the reason behind my current blog. How long is it going to survive? I don't know. It did well, so far, with ups and downs. Beyond my hiking recaps, almost everything I write starts from curiosity – a science-based question ("if I ate an apple a day for a year, how many kg of peel could I accumulate?"), something I want to understand well enough to explain, a brain teaser that sometimes keeps me awake. Since it's often something I don't know, a research phase almost always follows – and I admit that, sometimes, it derails my intention to write. I keep a dedicated note for each idea, where I track its evolution. When I feel like I've reached a conclusion of sorts, I then sketch out a structure and use it as a guide for the first draft. Curiously, all my notes are in English, but the first draft of anything I write is always in Italian. Then I translate into English, and very often rewrite some parts that don't flow very well in the other language. And yes, I often use Claude for a final proofread: I've given it strict instructions on what it can and can't touch, and how. The content is always mine, and I'm careful to keep it that way: I don't want to end up with a voice I no longer recognize as my own.