I was born in Valpolicella, a region just outside Verona. You might have seen the name on a wine menu - that's us. It's all vineyards, small towns a couple of kilometers apart, and not much happening. A quiet place to grow up.

I grew up in San Floriano, a small village where everyone knows everyone. Sunday lunches with family, long summer days with friends. This is the place where I've spent a significant part of my life, where I've met my best friends and where I always go back to whenever I get the chance.

In middle school I attended a private school in Verona. Even back then, I was a commuter: waking up early for a 40-minute bus ride every morning and not returning until late afternoon. I remember my friends having to yell my name as we approached my stop because I was always asleep on the window. I liked the independence of being away from home, although that changed in high school - I got a bit lazier and went to a school just five minutes down the road.

I first got interested in tech thanks to a friend of mine who one day waved his brand new Nokia in my face. Soon after, I bought a book on Java 1.8. It was written in Italian, and I spent an entire month reading it and trying stuff out on my computer; I still have photos of me bringing that book to school and reading it whenever I was bored by the lesson, which happened frequently. Looking back, it was probably the worst book I've ever read, but it was exactly what I needed at the time.

I got my very first proper phone when I was little - a BlackBerry Storm. I was able to do what I'd considered hacky stuff with it, like changing the theme and tweaking some functionality. I was just getting started back then. In the following years, I became a serial Android phone enthusiast. At one point I was selling my current device every six months just to buy the latest model. My friends and I were deep into custom ROMs, changing our devices' software on a weekly basis. I was incredibly active in the XDA community, which back then was the main gateway for this kind of activity and knowledge. To my surprise, my account is still there! It was during this time that I started teaching myself English. The Italian tech community was almost non-existent, and I realized that if I wanted to keep up, Italian just wasn't going to cut it.

After high school, my friends moved to Milan to study engineering. I knew I wanted to work with computers, though I didn't actually know software engineering was a formal career path yet. I followed them anyway and enrolled in computer science. I owe them for that decision, without that collective push, I'm not sure where I'd be today.

I graduated in 2019 and stayed for my Master's. If I'm honest, I spent more nights building side projects than studying for exams. I always preferred practical courses, the ones with a project to develop, because I knew that's how I actually learned and enjoyed diving deeper in the subject. Whenever there was code to write rather than a paper to take, I usually topped the class.

During my Master's I started feeling the pressure, I knew it was time to get to work. I sent out dozens of resumes and spent my nights grinding through Leetcode. I eventually landed interviews with both Apple and Amazon for internship roles. The Amazon process was somewhat ironic: after weeks of applying to every single one of their locations worldwide, I was met with nothing but rejections. When they finally reached out to interview me, I'd applied to so many roles that I couldn't even remember that particular application.

I eventually passed the Amazon interview and received an offer. As a diehard Apple fan, I had originally pinned all my hopes on their London office, but they ultimately chose another candidate. Looking back, I'm actually glad it went the way it did. I often tell myself that I'd rather join a company I like so much later on, once I have more knowledge in my bag and more experience to offer (coping hard?). Amazon was the right place to start - I'd passed the interviews, a team actually wanted me on board, and for a first big step that was more than enough.

For the first time, I moved abroad. Everything was a first: the language, the people, the food. Being completely on my own was exhilarating. Luxembourg is very tiny, like... super tiny. You can drive across the entire nation in twenty minutes. My funniest memory are the commutes back home; LuxAir used Bombardier Q400, tiny turboprops planes that sat maybe seventy people. If you don't like flying, please stay away from those. Harry and Ron had a smoother ride to Hogwarts in that flying Ford than a Q400 trying to land in a crosswind.

Searching for a home in a different country is not the easiest thing, you're not there yet but at the same time you want to make sure the place is okay. Had to make a few video calls with landlords, but I eventually found what I was looking for (also wrote a funny article about how). A kind French woman named Fabienne rented me a beautiful apartment. She traveled to Italy often and spoke the language, so maybe she saw a bit of home in me, too. If you're reading this, Fabienne, thank you.

The pros of being in such a small country is that everything is within reach. The daily commute to the office was great! I had my car parked right in front of my apartment and the office was five minutes away. The airport was very close to home as well, making it very convenient to travel back from time to time.

The thing I'll never forget about Luxembourg was the absolutely incredible public skatepark they had. During peak hours it probably had fifteen persons in it, an absolute dream (although friends told me that it recently became much more crowded). I've been riding a BMX since I was 14 and it's been my hobby for almost my entire life - my bike follows me everywhere, it also offers a nice way to make new friends in a new place. The unfortunate bit? Luxembourg's weather is not really that great, frequent rainy days made it impossible to enjoy the skatepark as much as I would have wanted.

I spent six months in Lux. I worked on a pretty big team (we were more than 15 back then!) within a massive company and saw what scale looked like. Unfortunately, I hit a hiring freeze right as my internship ended. No return offer, just the usual We will let you know if a position opens up, for people that work in tech that's a very common way of saying go find something else.

And so I returned back home. I looked for work, yes, but I also traveled with friends and let myself breathe. Sometimes you need to come back home before you can leave again.

The job market was tough. I had sent out hundreds of resumes but almost none of them worked out. Very few even bothered to send back a rejection. In the end, it wasn't a formal application that worked, but a simple post I made in a Who wants to be hired thread on Hacker News. A small startup in Lugano reached out, they decided to take a chance on me, and in June 2023, I packed my bags once more. Switzerland, this time.

I accepted the offer and told them I could start immediately. After four months of being unemployed, I was eager to get back to work, even if I didn't have a place to live yet. For the first month, I commuted from Verona to the office and back almost every day. It was a 200km trip each way, and the stress started to kick in fast. To get to the office, I had to take the infamous A4, arguably the most packed highway in the country. In the morning it's 70% trucks taking most of the the lanes, and the way back was even worse; I'd hit the evening rush where everyone in Switzerland was heading back into Italy at once, creating queues that lasted forever. I've always loved driving, but doing 400km a day in that kind of traffic was taking a toll on both me and my car. I eventually started staying in Airbnbs near the office just to save my sanity and gas money while I searched for a permanent roof.

Finding a home was quite the challenge. I specifically wanted to stay on the Italian side of the border because it's much more affordable than living in Switzerland. It's the best of both worlds: you earn a Swiss salary but pay Italian prices for rent and groceries. To make that work without being double-taxed by Italy, I had to live within 20km of the Swiss border to qualify for the special agreement between the two countries. Naturally, every other Italian working in Lugano had the exact same idea, making the market incredibly competitive. I eventually found a spot in Comerio, a small town near Varese. The 400km drives were finally over, and for a while, it worked.

After nine months, I realized I'd hit a wall. I wasn't learning much anymore—I already knew most of what I was doing. I wanted deep optimization problems and complex challenges, the kind that only exist at scale in big tech. I felt like I was coasting, and I hated it. I dusted off my CV and started looking again, this time for a role that would actually push me.

I started interviewing again in February while still living in Comerio. One process in particular started moving fast, and I could tell it was the right fit. I stayed near the border until late April to wrap things up, then moved back home for three months. It was a strange period of being in limbo, sorting out paperwork, packing up my life, and waiting for everything to be finalized. I enjoyed being back with family, but I was mostly just restless and ready to get moving again.

I moved to London in July. This time, it was to join Cloudflare. It was the city I'd been aiming for since that first Apple interview years ago, and I didn't have to think twice about taking the offer. Looking back, Hacker News has been a weirdly constant thread in my career. It's how I found the Swiss startup, but it's also how I discovered Cloudflare in the first place. Someone on there suggested I try their products back in early 2020, and I'd been using them and following their engineering blog ever since. After years of reading their posts on the front page, actually joining the team felt like the whole thing had finally come full circle.

Everyone warned me that finding an apartment in London takes months. Somehow, I found mine in a week. I'm still not sure if it was luck or fate, but I'll take it. I ended up in Zone 2, east side. Londoners tell me it doesn't feel like real London, and they might be right, but I love it anyway. I've always had a thing for skyscrapers, and after a year in a quiet border town, it's good to be back in a place that actually feels like a city.

I get to see Big Ben every time I'm in the office. Cloudflare's London headquarters sits right behind the London Eye, with windows facing Westminster. After two years, I've gotten used to the view. Sometimes I miss those first few weeks when I'd stop and stare - back when I was the one visiting London as a tourist, eager to see these same landmarks. It's strange how something so iconic can fade into routine.

Today, I'm part of the API Security team at Cloudflare. I feel incredibly lucky to do what I love in a city that feels like the center of the tech world. There's always an event to attend, a new project to start, or someone brilliant to learn from. The story continues.