I’m going to start this post differently. No elaborate metaphors, no Star Trek analogies, no code. Just a simple question that has been eating away at my brain since I moved to Europe:
Why the hell do I need an American account to download my own government’s application?
Let me give you some context. I live in Italy. I pay taxes in Italy. I have an Italian fiscal code. And when I need to access the official Italian government app (or Post Office app) to check my tax situation, what do I do? I open the Google Play Store, an American store, with my data stored on American servers, subject to American legislation, to download an application from a European country’s government.
I’ll start this post with a confession that might earn me some enemies: I hate JSON.
It’s not an irrational hate, the kind that appears out of nowhere. It’s a hate built, brick by brick, over years of debugging malformed payloads, fields that should have been numbers but arrived as strings, and that classic null where you expected an empty array. JSON is the digital equivalent of a phone conversation with your grandmother: you think you understood what she said, but when you get there, the carrot cake didn’t have that expected chocolate frosting (Brazilians will understand).
If you have read my previous posts about building a Home Server via CLI, you know exactly how I feel about Microsoft’s operating system. To me, using Windows for work or development is a waste of performance, privacy, and sanity. It consumes RAM just to exist, sends telemetry data about your mouse movements to Redmond, and restarts without your permission to install an update that changes the icon of the calculator.
