Dear Jan

Over the past few months, I’ve realized I’m going through a personal change that inevitably affects how I think about Strumenta.

For many years, my starting point was myself: my skills, my interests, and especially my fascination with language engineering. I worked with parsers, compilers, interpreters and the like because they were technically hard problems, elegant problems, and, if you enjoy them, deeply satisfying to work on. That’s where everything began.

As I looked for ways to apply those skills, I eventually ran into a very specific problem: migrations. Using these techniques to take code written in legacy programming languages and move it to modern ones. At first, it was mainly an engaging technical challenge.

Over time, that changed: I started to be driven more by the effect this work had, than on the work itself.

I grew up in an area of Italy full of small companies, many of them founded and grown in the 1970s and 1980s. These businesses adopted the technologies that made sense when they first computerized their operations. Today, many of them are constrained by those same choices. When you talk to these companies, the migration problem becomes very concrete: it’s not just old code, it’s reduced productivity, declining competitiveness, and a shrinking ability to innovate.

The more I spoke with these businesses, the less this felt like a purely technical challenge. It became a human one. Behind the code there are people, teams, and companies whose progress is limited not by lack of ideas or capability, but by the technological context they are stuck in.

We also work with large organizations—right now, for example, we’re migrating millions of lines of code for a major pension fund. But it’s with small companies that this problem feels most tangible to me. That’s where the impact is most immediate. I guess it's not just business, it becomes personal and I think it should be that way.

Helping these companies modernize isn’t just about upgrading technology. It’s about giving them a chance to restart, to regain momentum, and perhaps to rediscover the enthusiasm they once had—this time when moving to new technologies that restore productivity and make innovation possible again.

Cheers,

Federico

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