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, currently working as DevRel. I speak at conferences (not necessarily being on stage) and sometimes I have fun as Cloud Native Consultant and Trainer. I blog about tech and life. I organize Kubernetes Community Days in the Netherlands, KubeTrain and contribute to Cloud Native in any way I can.
I like to define myself as a jack of most trades, master of some.
📫 How to reach me: click here
Wanna book a meeting instead? Here's a secret link! 🤫
- Transparency
- Integrity
- Reliability
- Creativity
- 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.
I want to change the life of 1 million people in the next 5 years.
- "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.
- Guest Lecturer at University of Turin, speaking about Cloud Native Tech
- Spoke at international conferences and meetups such as: DevOops meetup, Cloud Native Rejekts EU 2024, DevOpsDays Amsterdam 2024... and more!
- My first co-founded startup - DevTools to streamline Kubernetes management
- KLab-CLI - an all-in-one CLI to manage EKS, AKS and GKE clusters, powered by Terraform (will migrate to OpenTofu eventually)
- 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, 1400+ subscribers
- KCD (Kubernetes Community Days) organizer - KCD Utrecht 2023 (program committee)
- Organizer of Kubetrain from Amsterdam to Paris for KubeCon EU 2024
- Program Committee KubeCon EU 2024
- Built a community of italian freelancers - 1000+ members
- Hosted a live podcast about IT and freelancing
- An engaging 2D game built during a 48-hours hackaton at Polimi (IT)
- 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!
Read here if you are curious about my hobbies and interests.
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!
- public GPG key
- note to recruiters and companies
- note to current and future colleagues
- I have an open calendar, use it!!
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...