About Me

I still remember the day when my mother came to pick up me and my sister early from school. After saying goodbye to the teacher she tells us "The attic has flooded, we have to go home immediately!". We rush into the car, enter the house and go upstairs. Once in the attic there was no water leak, but on the study table there was a new object, similar to a gray plastic television. Our first family computer.

I still didn't know what it was for, just a new object to discover for a book devourer like me. Next to it was a disk with Encarta 98 written on it: the multimedia encyclopedia that would have saved my mother hours of waiting in the library and stolen all my free time. Distant cities near and far to explore and information on all animals, from penguins to polar bears described anything you could imagine.

I still remember the afternoons spent creating the first word files with school research, choosing from that infinite catalog of topics all the most interesting information. The beautiful day arrived when by mistake that fantastic magic machine jammed. The file with my research, the result of an afternoon spent reading pages and reworking my beloved digital encyclopedia seemed to have been lost. No problem, the neighbor downstairs is a computer wizard, he will surely have a solution. Once the file was recovered, he told me "You don't need to rewrite all the texts with the keyboard, you can copy and paste using CTRL+C and CTRL+V.". Perhaps unconsciously it was at that moment that I really understood the importance of UX.

Then one afternoon dad took me to visit uncle's office, obviously my first request was to see his computer. "Of course, here we also have internet" my uncle told me, seeing my curious look he explained that from his pc it was possible to access information from other computers without inserting CDs.

While wired a small box full of lights made strange noises he told me "We are connected! What would you like to see?". In my hand I still had the last issue of the comic I was reading in the car "Mickey Mouse!". A few minutes of waiting and there it was, the Disney website in English with all my favorite characters drawn. "No dad, I want to stay here", "I'll save it on a floppy" so you can continue to see it from home, said my uncle.

I believe that each of us experienced his dose of amazement between the '90s and the new millennium. And for a person like me those magic boxes with screens and chips were all I wanted. I still smile when I remember the allowances accumulated to buy video game cartridges for the NES and Game Boy and the summer vacation afternoons spent creating scenarios in Age of Empires with my friends.

Then I grew up, and the day came when I logged on to the site of one of my favorite online role-playing games and read The site will remain closed until further notice. A few minutes of shock, then from the speakers I hear a beep from my best friend on MSN. Still shaken by the news, jokingly he said What if we created one just like it?. There was no need to ask "I'm in!".

So I spent the high school years with my best friend among graphic software and programming manuals, spending the evenings developing our first RPG online play by chat and collecting the first feedback from the players who spent the evenings playing with us on our first web portal.

That dream was crowned with our first gathering in Rome, where players from all over Italy came to meet those two kids who alone had turned a joke into a dream, then the dream into fun and fun into reality.

After many years, I still love this world in which one never stops learning. Between university and work, I have designed, implemented and coordinated many digital projects, continuing to be amazed by all the ways technology can change our lives.

Certainly it changed mine, since I'm still here in front of my beloved mac having fun writing yet another web page 🧑🏼‍💻.