I am a husband and a father of three kids, and I have three cats. Me and my family have lived in 3 different countries as I was running the rat race working for large corporations.
Later we moved to a farm in the Italian countryside.
I like Anthropology, Sociology, Music, Theater, Arts. I compose music and I build guitars out of recycled materials. I take photographs. I read a lot. I write a lot (here and elsewhere).
Most of all I am interested in the power of language, of sharing ideas, of telling stories.
I’ve got extensive knowledge of design, project and product management, community engagement, operations and security management for Internet software systems and cloud services, and I have learned to navigate and drive the business aspects of IT, DevOps and Development teams working for many famous corporations: Microsoft, Symantec (and their respective large customers), and more. I have worked at Microsoft on enterprise/cloud products and services till 2015.
Anyhow, I am not an engineer. I didn’t follow any particular school or college to get into the IT world. I had actually started the first year of Sociology at the university, but quickly decided to drop out: it was 1997, everybody in Europe was getting onto the internet, and I seized the opportunity to start working in IT, starting from a very humble role that gave me economic independence from my parents, and eventually made my way up in the IT business by continuing to work hard in that field for over 18 years and gaining real experience of real companies and real projects from the ‘bottom up’ (my favorite way of learning).
I do like technology, but most of all I like the potential of interconnecting people and sharing information. I am also painfully aware of issues the over-use and pervasiveness of technology is creating – damages we are doing to the environment, psychological and physiological issues to individuals/societies, issues related to privacy and security, etc.
I think technology should be the mean to achieve something useful, but ‘innovation’ for the sake of it (and just for making more money) should not be the purpose driving it all.
The future of our planet and our children should be the most important driver for society, but we know there are issues: over-production (and waste) while poverty exists elsewhere, wars, inequality, pollution, global warming, extinction of flora and fauna while we get fed genetically modified food and get all sort of new ‘diseases’ due to stress and the insane speed we are trying to live at… these are hardly ever taken into account in the ‘cost’ of capitalist ‘growth’.
I am tired and literally sick of that, and that’s why I left the big corporate world.
I am currently make musical instruments (mainly guitars at the moment) out of recycled materials and I have work to do at the farm in the Italian countryside where we live. I also still lend my IT skills and work part time for organizations that contribute to good causes and want to make the world a better place or for helping friends; I am not interested in the ‘next cool thing’ built just for making more money.
My thoughts and opinions often change, and as a weblog is intended to provide a semi-permanent point in time snapshot you should not consider out of date posts to reflect my current thoughts and opinions, nor those of my employer (at any given time).
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