I wrote software for the European Space Agency

I need to write this down somewhere, because I still don't fully believe it.

I have been working on a side project for the European Space Agency. Yes, that one. The people who send things into orbit.

Together with another developer, I built a digital signage system for ESA ESRIN, the agency's site in Italy. That is the only technical sentence you will get in this post, I promise.

In practice it means screens in the corridors of ESRIN, and on those screens there is content and video streamed from the space station. The one that is orbiting the Earth right now, while I type this. People walk to a meeting, glance at a screen, and there it is: footage from space. Software I helped write is putting it there.

And then, on the same screens, the coffee bar's daily offers.

I can't stop laughing about this. Space station feed, then cappuccino and cornetto, then back to the space station. It is the most Italian thing I have ever seen, and honestly also the most human one. Even at the European Space Agency, somebody needs to know if there is a discount on the pastries today.

I have worked on a lot of projects so far. Marketplaces, agency websites, APIs, e-commerce. They were all real work, with real clients and real deadlines, and I'm proud of many of them. But none of them made the kid in me jump up and down like this one does.

Because that is exactly how I feel: like a kid. The grown-up me knows it is a web app showing content on screens, with requirements, bugs and a deployment like any other project. The kid me only hears "space station" and "European Space Agency" in the same sentence as his name and loses his mind a little.

I'm not an astronaut, and I will never be one. I'm a developer in Milan who writes code. But for a short while some of that code gets to live inside a place where people actually work on space, next to views of our planet from above (and next to the croissants).

I'll take it. Happily.