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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 a DevRel, living in Europe, sometimes I have fun as Cloud Native Consultant and Trainer. 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 people 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, 1200+ subscribers
• KCD (Kubernetes Community Days) organizer - KCD Utrecht 2023
• Organizer of Kubetrain from Amsterdam to Paris for KubeCon EU 2024
• Program Committee KubeCon EU 2024
• Cloud pirates podcast - A podcast about Cloud Native technologies and tech in general, co-hosting with my friend Alessandro
• 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 wanted to scale my impact on the IT industry and to help more people and companies to achieve their goals. ⛰️

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...