I have always been passionate about computers and technology, but I started to code when I was 15, after switching highschool from a scientific and mostly theoretical one to what in Italy is called "technical" high school, where I learned the basics of programming and computer science 👨‍💻.

I was never a good student, I was always bored by school 🥱 and I never liked to study, but I was always curious and I loved to learn new things, especially if they were related to computers. My professors at that time used to tell me that I would never work in IT because I was not good enough, but I never gave up and I kept learning on my own 🤓.

Most people in my life were also not happy about my choice, they wanted me to go to university and get a degree to go for a "real job" 🤨 instead of "playing with computers", but I was not interested in that, I wanted to work and learn by doing, not by studying.

I started my professional journey in 2015 as a web developer, I started to write production grade PHP code even before I got my driving license. 🚗 As employee I started as fullstack, in a small company building embedded software in C and some intarnal tools in C#, then I joined a promising local startup, always as fullstack but back to PHP with a Laravel flavor.

Graduating from my high school I then moved to a bigger city (Milan), switched language to specialize in Java and built my back(end) as a Software Engineer, I climbed the ladder, worked on large scale products (8+ million users) and finally became a Senior Software Engineer. 👷

Since I am a fundamentally lazy person, I learnt to love automation, starting with bash scripts and moving on to DevOps tools and practices. I joined the Dark Side of DevOps and Site Reliability taking the best from my SWE background (I've never stopped to use the --force) taking over a Staff DevOps Role. 🌌

At some point, after leading DevOps initatives and bringing multiple teams from 0 to GitOps, I felt that I reached a ceiling in my career both in the company I worked at that time and in the italian IT landscape (not so rich, if you ask me). That is the reason why I decided to start my journey in 2021 as a freelance professional and digital nomad. ✈️🏝️ I wanted to scale my impact on the IT industry and to help more people and companies to achieve their goals. ⛰️

I coached and mentored my padawans (ehm I mean, my students) about DevOps principles and practices. I also helped companies to improve their DevEx and embrace the DevOps culture. 📚

In the meantime I learnt a bit more about frontend, especially React. I always despised Javascript but after learning about Typescript I started to like it a bit more. Still not my jam but I can live with it. Nodejs is more fun than I expected, I'll give you that. 🙆‍♂️

Back to the story, in all this time I've been in the IT industry, I've learned a lot from hands on experience and had the opportunity to interact with truly amazing people. 🤝

After digital nomading across Europe, in 2023 I took the next step and I've become the co-founder and CTO of a startup for one year: KubeLab. Here is where I enjoyed the challenge of building a new company culture, a service and a product from scratch and of course taking care of my team. 🤟

In the end we could not find the Product-Market Fit, even after raising a pre-seed amount and had to step back, but quoting Yoda: "The greatest teacher, failure is."

In the end I kept advocating for Cloud Native technologies, I am a Kubernetes lover and part of the CNCF community. ☸️💙 I strongly believe in the power of Platform Engineering and I look forward to impact the IT industry with my work. 🏋️

What will I do in 2024 and beyond? Who knows! 🤩

To be continued...