About me

For my professional career and details visit LinkedIn. I’ve also been a top 9% reputation contributor on StackOverflow for over 3 years. Here’s two things about me:

1 – Skin in the game and ownership

I often tend to be the person on the left, starting and driving initiatives all the way to accomplishment.

2 – Action over theory

Tell me your life stories. I love them.

In a technical discussion, we will always agree. Either

  1. You bring info I didn’t know
  2. I bring info you didn’t know
  3. My favourite – We reach a third better conclusion together.

I can also disagree and then commit, there is nothing wrong with that, and we’ll get more done. Nothing beats hands-on experience.

I admire Elon Musk’s, big accomplisher and understander, and Jeff Bezos’s category design acumen. Someone considers them incompatible, but both have worked overtime through hardships and brought a vision to life. I am currently below these gentlemen in both areas, but I am working hard to fill the gap.

And then miscellaneous facts:

  • I have a personal dream – all I do, career included, is to achieve it and provide my contribution.
  • I get involved in communities and events. My friends are precious, thanks to them I am updated on technology trends and hot topics, and we get opportunities to start fun projects or business.
  • I am very lucky. I met exceptional people who inspired me with their insights and experience. Without them I wouldn’t be the person I am. I’ll dedicate a few lines to 2 superstars:
    • Vincenzo Fabio – He started using C when it came out, as an upgrade over Assembly and BASIC. One of his least accomplishments was creating a CPU architecture emulator that used a spider hardware inserted into the CPU socket of a motherboard, that output to a parallel port to a PC, where an assembly program ran an architecture emulation, translating instructions to Zilog Z80000 and fed back the output to the motherboard. I and Vincenzo spent 15 days pair programming and performed the work normally done by a team of 15+ engineers in 6 months. When Certification Authorities analyzed our source code, they said this was the best code in that market.
    • Daniele Torchio – He is really good. No, you have no idea. I am at a loss of words. So an example may better explain. You may have heard about that Amazon employee who made a cat door that only opened for his own cat, using ML? Daniele invented this device before ML was even possible. He can get one creative idea like that and one working prototype in a day of work (+ components shipping time). His lab is wonderful, with components, tools, and a tidy organization. On shelves lie all sorts of prototypes and he has a story for each. If every person in the world were like Daniele Torchio, mankind would technologically be one millennium forward. You’ll think this is a figure of speech, when in fact I am 100% serious.

(For me, this is a lesson of humility. 95% of Engineers can’t dream to reach this level in their lives — I definitely pushed myself forward thanks to my friends).

And as a curiosity, some of non-obvious specialties of mine include:

  • UX – With a lifetime committment and field experience
  • ML
  • IoT
  • Very low-level programming including hardware and electronics
  • 3D programming – I can use Quaternions, not just Euler angles like 99% people. It’s not necessary I know. But I once got a job offer because of that (which I had to decline).
  • AWS and Cloud FinOps (also called Cloud Financial Management)