What is Press Any Key.

Press Any Key is where I share what I know about tech and what keeps me up at night about it. It’s also my shot at showing you how this world really works from the inside: not the sales-brochure version or the keynote version, but the one you get from someone who’s spent years down in the engine room.

And that means the good, the bad and the ugly. The good stuff is real, and there’s plenty of it: tools that save you weeks of work, architectures that can take whatever you throw at them, and teams that actually work. But there’s the bad and the ugly too: trends people jump on just because, meetings that should have been a pull request, ideas that slowly die in committee, and cloud bills nobody dares to open. Only talking about the pretty parts would be telling you half the story, and the other half is usually the one that hurts most when it catches you off guard.

Why Press Any Key?

After enough years in this line of work, you pile up scar tissue: commands you only remember when it’s already too late, configs that work on the third try, projects that went great for reasons nobody could explain, and others that went sideways for reasons everybody saw coming. What really gets me out of bed is turning that scar tissue into practical, no-nonsense ideas so other people don’t have to earn the same scars.

I started on YouTube, with a channel I had to put on hold for personal reasons. Even then I realized not everything fits in a video, or in a text: some things click better with a terminal in front of you, and others call for an unhurried conversation. Press Any Key is where all of that lives under one roof, and I plan to pick the channel back up with a lot more fire than the first time around.

What you’ll find here

Every topic gets told in whatever format suits it best. Articles are for thinking things through; the podcast is for listening while you do something else; videos are for watching stuff actually run; and tutorials and labs are for getting your hands dirty. Some topics come in just one format and others come in all of them, so you get to pick how you want to learn it.

The goal is simple: that you walk away from each piece understanding a bit better why things are the way they are, with enough judgment of your own to decide what to do about it. No snake oil and no talking down to anyone, just the way I’d tell you in front of a whiteboard, or over a beer, depending on the time of day.

Who’s behind it

I’m Lino, and for over twenty-five years I’ve been getting computers to do things that, on paper, shouldn’t break.

Along the way I’ve bounced around industries as different as nuclear power, banking, advertising, insurance, and healthcare. I’ve been a developer, a functional analyst, a project manager, and a software architect, sometimes all at once and almost never with an up-to-date org chart. These days I work as a solutions architect: I help companies build, migrate, or modernize their applications, which is a fancy way of saying I spend my days explaining why the thing that ran fine on somebody’s laptop isn’t going to scale on its own.

When the laptop shuts down

I share my place with my cats, who have very strong opinions about the household pecking order, and I’m not the one at the top. I spend more time playing with them than I’d ever admit in a job interview. In exchange, they supervise my coding sessions by strolling across the keyboard, which explains the occasional commit nobody can quite make sense of.

I also have a chronic inability to leave anything unopened. If it has screws, I take it apart; if it has firmware, I flash it; if it has a hidden serial port, I’ll find it. Not everything goes back together with the same screws it came with, but almost everything works again. Almost.

I’m an amateur musician too: I bang on guitars and strum drums. Yep, you read that right, and my neighbors would be more than happy to back me up on that.

And I fly drones. Or, to be precise, I fly them until they stop flying. I’ve already sent a few to the propeller graveyard, casualties of daredevil maneuvers that Spain’s aviation authority frowns upon pretty firmly and that I, with all the wisdom that comes with experience, still haven’t quite learned to avoid.

All of this has something in common with my day job and with Press Any Key: the itch to know how things work on the inside, and the patience, not always enough of it, to fix them when they stop working.

Unless otherwise stated, my articles are licensed under Creative Commons Attribution–NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY‑ND 4.0). You’re free to copy and share them unchanged, as long as you credit the author and link back to the original article.