Who am I?

That's me
I was born in the 2nd largest city in Sicily, Italy, called Catania, a place dominated by a 3100m volcano (Etna).
I am an Internet user since 1996, I started using GNU/Linux back in 1999 thanks to a bunch of people I’ve met at my local university during one installation party.

Those people were part of the first Italian HackLab called the Freaknet Medialab born initially as a FidoNet BBS and then converted into an hack-lab where people could physically get together and work on projects or simply learn together new stuff without all the formality of an university.

I started working as a programmer (mainly PHP, with some POSIX C), but in 2004 I’ve decided to move to the sysadmin world. I was already operating the principle of devops/production engineering well before the concept was born 🙂

Mount Etna, in Sicily

I enjoy coding (bash/python/perl/php/golang/C++-11/Objective-C. All my coding is aimed to improve my day-by-day work by the means of automation and auto-remediation. I feel accomplished when I see things integrating nicely with other things. 🙂

I believe it’s very important for both developers and system administrators to try to build an experience on both software development and system administration fields. It’s crucial to understand software from both ends™.

After an experience in a small ISP in my hometown I moved to a consulting company which gave me the opportunity to travel around Italy and work within some Telcos companies like Nokia Italy, Vodafone Italy, Logica CMG, FastWeb. At that time I also enjoyed working with linux based embedded devices and developing kernel space modules to control them (ie LEDs, buttons, etc).

After a while I got frustrated of the way things were done in Italy, and I realized that I needed to move abroad to try to boost my career.

North bank of the river Liffey at Dublin City Center at night
North bank of the river Liffey at Dublin City Center at night

So I decided to risk everything moving to Ireland in 2008 where I found a place as Deployment Engineer in Newbay Software, where I spent my ~3 years working on projects like AT&T Mobileshare and Telstra Tribe occasionally traveling to the US and Germany.

In 2011 I jumped on the amazing Facebook ship, and I currently work as a Production Engineer in the Cluster Infrastructure team in Dublin.

My family
My family

I am married to Katiuscia since 2010 and I am a father of a lovely daughter since 2013, when I don’t hack around computers I love to spend my time with photography. I was into film photography for years (shooting medium format, pinhole, etc), but since 2013 I have got less time for that and therefore I am mainly shooting with my Fujifilm X-E2s.

Where you can find me on the internet