Hi there!
My name is Matteo but my nicknames are many, depending on the many context you find me in (gaming? reddit? music?).
I'm an engineer living in Europe, working as freelance Cloud Native Consultant. In my spare time I mentor people, help startups filling their tech gaps and blog about tech and life. I organize(d) Kubernetes Community Days in the Netherlands.
📫 How to reach me: click here
Wanna book a meeting instead? Here's a secret link! 🤫
My core values
- Transparency
- Integrity
- Reliability
- Creativity
My mission
- Do my best to make the world a better place by building something meaningful and impactful.
- Help engineers to achieve their goals, sharing my knowledge and experience and giving back to the community that helped me to grow.
- Advocate for Cloud Native Open-Source technologies. Open-Source has been the past, is the present and will be the future of IT and powers the world we live in today.
- Simplify the life of my fellow developers and engineers, by building tools and services that make their life easier.
Big Hairy Audacious Goal (can I say the naming is terrible?)
I want to change the life of at least 1 million developers in the next 5 years.
Quotes I try to live by
- "If you torture the data long enough, it will confess to anything." - Ronald Coase
This basically thought me to not fully believe data unless I know context and how it has been collected.
- The best code is no code at all. - Coding Horror blog
I think this is self-explanatory but I'll add that before writing new code I always ask myself: "Is there a way to do this without writing (a lot of) code?". Answer is usually open-source, SaaS or adapt pre-existing code. Still, I try to keep my code as simple as possible following KISS, DRY and YAGNI principles.
- "Clear is kind. Unclear is unkind." - Brene Brown
I try to be as clear as possible when communicating with people, with little or no space for ambiguity. I also try to be kind, but I'm not always perceived as such, truth hurts sometimes.
- "Homines dum docent discunt." / Humans learn while they teach. - Seneca
I learn a lot by teaching, I'm a teacher at heart and I love to share my knowledge and experience with others.
Achievements
- Kubernetes based startup - DevTools to streamline Kubernetes management
- KLab-CLI - an all-in-one CLI to manage K8s clusters on AWS, Azure and GCP
- Helped a cancer research center to save more lifes - Machine Learning on Azure Cloud infrastructure, connected to a mobile gaming app, what a game changer!
- My tech blog - 50k+ views monthly, 1000+ subscribers
- Co-organized KCD Netherlands - KCD Utrecht 2023
- Organizer of Kubetrain from Amsterdam to Paris for KubeCon EU 2024
- Program Committee KubeCon EU 2024
- Cloud pirates podcast - coming soon
- Built a community of italian freelancers - 600+ members
- Hosted a live podcast about IT and freelancing
- An engaging 2D game built during a hackaton
- My former metal band - 50k+ views/listen I sing
- All the marvellous relationships I've built with people all over the world, in the tech industry but also in the music industry. I'm a people person!
Extra about me
Read here if you are curious about my hobbies and interests.
Tech stack
See my (partial) tech stack here, I will try to keep it updated and to find a better way to display it. Suggestions are welcome!
Important
- public GPG key
- note to recruiters and companies
- note to current and future colleagues
- I have an open calendar, use it!!
Long story (never) short
I was always 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). 🌌
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 coached and mentored my padawans (ehm I mean, my students) about DevOps principles and practices. I also helped companies to improve their DevEx and DevOps approach. 📚
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 CTO of a startup for one year, 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 and had to step back, but quoting Yoda: "The greatest teacher, failure is."
I keep 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...