This post was translated from Italian with the help of Claude.

I’ve been playing tabletop RPGs with my current group for six years. We started online because the group is spread across Rome, Naples and Brazil. One evening a week, almost always, and I’ve never been bored. One of the things I’ve always loved, both as a game master and as a player, is imagining and describing scenes: when it works, what happens during a session becomes almost a real memory, and days later the players retell it with the same casualness of recounting a weekend at the beach. That feeling is worth more than anything else.

(This post is also available in Italian, change the language in the top-right corner to read it / Questo post è disponibile anche in Italiano, cambia la lingua in alto a destra per leggerlo)

What is a real programmer? I’ve been doing this job for thirty years and I thought I knew. But then at Codemotion Roma I heard this: “Those who use frameworks are not real programmers”. Maybe it was just a provocative joke. Maybe. Or maybe our profession, like many others, suffers from a form of elitism where one’s own way of doing programming is the only worthy one.

Universe Generator

1996: Access Basic and Virtual Dice

There’s a piece of code I’ve been carrying around for thirty years. Yes, thirty years. Since 1996. It was part of a personal project related to role-playing games, built on Microsoft Access 2.0, prehistoric stuff. In Access Basic, the scripting language that preceded VBA. For its time, it was incredibly advanced.

The system was a simple generator of space sectors based on probability tables. I found the tables on the internet, designed as aids for space-themed role-playing games. Using d6 and d100 dice, it could create star systems, their stars, and their planets. It was very simple, without many details (stellar class, planet type, diameter, and number of moons) and no pretense of realism. It was enough for me to let my imagination soar through outer space.