Oct. 2, 2022, noon

PinkLetter - The day I almost met a Chilean television star

PinkLetter (odone.io)

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Welcome to my PinkLetter. A short, weekly, technology-agnostic, and pink newsletter where we cultivate timeless skills in web development.

My Ramblings This Week

What story from your past describes you?

Back in 2013, I made a decision that changed my life: I accepted a scholarship to study at Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile.

As soon as I landed in Santiago, I realized my basic Spanish was useless. It turns out, they don’t really speak Spanish in Chile, they speak Chilean. It’s not a different language, but countless Spaniards got lost with their Castilian Spanish.

I really wanted to get to know the people and their culture, and I couldn’t do it without learning Chilean and its funky words and variations. So I jumped in.

I had my fuckups. I was too young to know that vulgar language can be more dangerous than fun. That’s how I got slapped by calling somebody weona.

But I also rocked it. When traveling across South America, people thought I was from Chile—it made me so proud. Also, folks started calling me Benni.

I discovered there’s a famous Italian emigrant, whose name is Gabriele Benni and speaks Chilean with an exaggerated Italian accent.

I don’t know why it took me so long, but after a few months of being Benni-ed by people, I wrote an email to him:

Screenshot of the email

Hi Benni!

I’m an Italian exchange student in Santiago. It’s been one year since I started exploring Chile and its culture. Obviously, my Chilenization process went through “Benni”: since I discovered you on Youtube, I turned into a whole weón.

Since then, all the people I met traveling across Chile have been imploring me to sing “Enchufa.” And I’ll never forget a girl that I met in San Pedro who, after a five-minute conversation, said: “Chao Benni.” Like that!

Unfortunately, in a few weeks I’ll be back in Italy, however, Chile has been a wonderful experience and I’ll always keep with me a Benni to remind me how this journey of one year away from home changed my life.

I only made a promise to myself: not to leave the country without having you tell me I’m a weón in person.

What do you say, want to grab a coffee?

Greetings and thank you for teaching me how to speak like a Chilean, Riccardo

As expected, I didn’t get any answers back. Sure, we are not talking about Tom Cruise, but he’s television material.

A few weeks later, I had completely forgotten about the email and, while I was doing the research that brought me to Poland for an internship eventually, I received this email:

Screenshot of the email

Riccardo how are you? You have to excuse me but I just read your email. A lot of people write to me and I never have the time to read and respond.

If you are still in Chile call me to meet, it would be a big pleasure.

A hug Benni

Wow, what a bummer! Not only he wanted to meet, but he also sent me his phone number.

Unfortunately, it was a few thousand kilometers late, but I’m grateful for life to Benni. And the tears running down my cheeks are a testament to that.

I’m even more grateful to Chile and its people. You really changed my life.

¡Viva Chile!

Riccardo posing in front of the Chilean flag

Elsewhere on the Web

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A breakdown of how you can go about when picking for a good typeface for headings, that goes along with your branding.

Riccardo: Fonts are a cool little niche.


😄 HTML9 Responsive Boilerstrap JS by Louis Lazaris

H9RBS.js (v0.0001) is a flexible, dependency-free, lightweight, device-agnostic, modular, baked-in, component framework MVC library shoelacestrap to help you kickstart your responsive CSS-based app architecture backbone kitchensink tweetybirds.

Riccardo: LOL. We should create a lorem ipsum generator that creates front-end frameworks descriptions.


📕 How to Write TypeScript Like a Haskeller by Aleksandr Pakulev

At Serokell, we use TypeScript for writing web applications. But our main programming language is Haskell. And in this article, we want to show how Haskell knowledge can help you write TypeScript code.

Riccardo: A bit hardcore but it helped me understand Haskell and TypeScript better.

You just read issue #117 of PinkLetter (odone.io). You can also browse the full archives of this newsletter.

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