Hello,
my name’s Antonio and I’m from Italy. On this page you’ll find some personal and professional information about me.

Academic and professional path

I was born in southern Italy where I spent most of my childhood. At the age of 19 I decided to move to Modena, in northern Italy, where I graduated in Computer Engineering. Modena is a great city, neither too small nor too big. Its engineering university (Enzo Ferrari) was already famous for its mechanical courses and for its relation with the Formula 1 team.

While graduating I worked as an intern in SolidWorld and then got hired as a regular employee after my degree. That was my first work experience in the programming field and it was pretty amazing. After a while I started dreaming about a bigger city and so I moved to Milan.

Yes…. Big city life baby! I still remember the first time I entered the Central Train Station. I was looking through the train window, staring at the tall and crowded buildings. I was hired in Westwing Home and Living thanks to one of my ex-colleague I’ve known from my previous job. Truly startup experience: no fixed hours, lots of work, and lots of fun. My colleagues and I were in charge to design and maintain the entire network infrastructure. I’ve been there for almost 3 exciting years until I realized I wanted to go further.

It was at that time that I decided to go “abroad”. I’m using commas because I was still leaving in Italy (at the border) but working in Switzerland. It’s a case where you’re a commuter who crosses the border every day. In short, it didn’t last long. What did I learn from this? That if you want to go abroad, you should go all in and really MOVE.

After my short experience “abroad” I decided to move back to Milan where I got hired by a videogames company: WhatWapp. There I had the chance to combine my passion for programming and videogames. I really appreciated the startup feeling at the beginning while working inside an apartment and eating pizza every Friday with all the (young) colleagues. Everyone there was so passionate and enough “nerdy” to make the environment very enjoyable. On the other side, there was a lot of work to do. And when I say a lot I mean REALLY A LOT. Keeping up with the market when you’re a mobile games company is pretty difficult: you have to offer the best service possible every day by studying and understanding customers’ needs (not always an easy thing). That experience showed me all the work that is hidden behind the fancy game you play daily on your phone. At that moment I realized that there’s a huge difference between being passionate about videogames and making videogames for a living. And… I like the former more than the latter apparently.

So here we are in the present times. After 2 years in the game industry, I moved to a new company, Altroconsumo, as a Software Engineer. It is a bigger and well-structured company that is part of a wider European group. They aim to promote and defend consumer interests, solve their problems and help them exercise their fundamental rights. This gave me a huge feeling of satisfaction. Being able to see my daily job affecting and hopefully improving peoples’ life in some way is very rewarding.

To be continued…