People and Blogs: Stefano Verna

Let’s start from the basics: can you introduce yourself?

I’m Stefano, I’m 40 years old, I live in Italy. I have three sons (the oldest turned 18 last week — happy birthday Ale!). I try to be a present and attentive father, and I believe I am, despite the compromises that come with divorce.

I discovered programming at 12 with a little book I found at the library featuring games in QuickBASIC… and I never stopped from there. Creating digital things has always been my greatest passion.

In my first year of university, I released one of the very first Firefox extensions, which was an immediate huge success: in no time, 2M daily users… and thousands were donating on PayPal! A huge thing for a 19-year-old. From that experience on, I kept recreating that recipe: building my own software on the web.

After many years in the web agency world, one of the many ideas I threw together in my spare time for fun, DatoCMS, was once again very successful. 10 years after the first line of code I wrote, the product continues to exist, grow, and be used all over the world. Today we’re about 15 people working on it. For me, it’s a true dream come true.

Apart from programming, which continues to be a fundamental part of my life in terms of fulfillment and satisfaction (perhaps too much so), I’m an idealist, a man of the left, and a great enthusiast of meditation, psychology, and personal growth work in general.

What’s the story behind your blog?

I’ve had various blogs in my life. The first one was as a teenager, in the full Blogger era (2004), to communicate and find friends. I even found my future wife and mother of my children there. The second was to find work and make myself known professionally (the articles are still on Github).

My current blog, squeakish, was born after a month-long vacation I took a couple of years ago in Brazil: disconnecting (for the first time in my life, actually!) from responsibilities for an extended period gave me the chance to think about many things differently. It inspired me and made me want to study and write again.

It’s called squeakish because I’m (proudly?) the exact opposite of a solid and confident person. I’m full of internal creaks, and my blog contains posts that represent “yieldings,” vulnerabilities that I feel like exploring and sharing.

What does your creative process look like when it comes to blogging?

Inspiration always comes from personal reflections that I feel the need to communicate. Often these are difficult things that I struggle to put out into the world. Of these reflections, only a small portion ends up on the blog. Most of them I feel are too personal in their details to be of value to someone else. This is perhaps the biggest block at the moment: understanding the threshold for when something should move from my personal journal to being shared on the blog. I should probably worry less about it?

My posts are always written in a single session — I want them to remain as authentic as possible to the moment they were conceived. I wait a few hours before publishing them, to be able to reread them and see if something can be improved, and then they’re online.

Do you have an ideal creative environment? Also do you believe the physical space influences your creativity?

My creative process needs to be facilitated, first of all by taking dedicated time. This is the fundamental thing. Normally I’ve always written from home, in my usual “nest,” but lately (and even right now) I’m trying to change locations (bars, cafés). Surrounding yourself with different things helps you see things differently. I also try to avoid any kind of “aesthetic” distraction — I write in a notepad without any formatting (Paper), and only at the very end I copy on the CMS and format.

A question for the techie readers: can you run us through your tech stack?

The site is in Astro and the code is available on Github: there’s a README that explains the details. I had fun learning and implementing webmentions, microformats, backfeeding from Mastodon, and I wrote a brief guide about it.

The content is on, well, DatoCMS. I didn’t want to invent anything new — it’s what I know like the back of my hand, and I know it already gives me everything I need and like, including easy image and video management.

The site is deployed on Cloudflare Pages, the domain is on Spaceship.

I tried to keep the layout as simple as possible, and even copied the Hey World layout. No distractions!

Given your experience, if you were to start a blog today, would you do anything differently?

The first version of the site was in Svelte: working in the headless CMS world, in ten years I’ve really worked with all the available platforms, static site generators, and frameworks, and I’ve come to the conclusion that today Astro is the most suitable and versatile tool for producing content-driven websites. YMMV.

The name “Squeakish” still appeals to me — it has something playful about it and doesn’t take itself too seriously — but I’ve never been a fanatic about finding perfect names.

So yeah, right now I’m good with what I have!

Financial question since the Web is obsessed with money: how much does it cost to run your blog? Is it just a cost, or does it generate some revenue? And what’s your position on people monetising personal blogs?

The only cost… is for the domain ($30/year)? Cloudflare Pages is free, the DatoCMS project is on a free plan. Personally, I have no need to monetize my blog. With monetization automatically comes a sense of responsibility, and this is exactly the opposite of what I’m looking for.

I have no negative opinion about those who do it. The important thing is to avoid the enshittification that money normally brings. Personal blogs, as you well know, are the soul of the Internet, and we must try to preserve them free and sincere.

Time for some recommendations: any blog you think is worth checking out? And also, who do you think I should be interviewing next?

God, there are so many! My feed reader is actually publicly visible at /news and at the bottom there’s the list of people I follow. Personally, I’d go with David Celis and/or Chris!

Final question: is there anything you want to share with us?

Having your own simple feed reader publicly available inside your own website is something I haven’t seen anywhere else, but it’s simple to build and I feel gives a nice high-level view into what one person is currently feeding himself with. I've actually wrote a bit about this.

I just watched a wonderful film, so I feel the need to share it: O Filho de mil Homens.

Finally, I’d like to use this space to offer my experience (personal? professional?) to anyone who might need it: if you’d like to have a chat, and you think I might be able to help you with something, reach out via PM on Mastodon and I’ll try to do my best!