About

I build my own tools. That goes back a long way — my mom bought me a building set when I was a kid — and I like programming for the same reason: the creative process of making something and watching it work.

I started early: at eleven I was teaching computer classes, at twelve I ran an internet café, and by fourteen I was programming. The computer has been my territory since I was a child. My hunger for knowledge never stops.

AI has gripped me since before LLMs — I came in through convolutional neural networks — and LLMs only fanned that flame.

At twelve I read Journey to the West, the adventures of the Monkey King, and from there I got to the Dao De Jing: that was my door into Chinese culture. Through that same door came a very special friend — a Cantonese guy I started playing online with eighteen years ago; he liked Western culture and was learning Spanish. And the Dao De Jing left me something else: my way of teaching.

I'm a music lover, and the sound matters to me as much as the music does. I listen to Baroque, opera and epic music, and I'm fascinated by compositions made with virtual instruments — VSTs let you stack layers until you reach pieces that would be impossible to play in the real world. In epic music my favourite is Phil Rey; Yuki Kajiura composes incredible things; and Dimash's voice, with those melismas, sounds like it comes from another planet. If you don't know them, I hope you get to listen to them.

I learned basic Italian because of opera: I didn't want to miss what they were saying, or the mindset they were singing it with. In classical music the performer makes a new work every time — the metronome didn't exist until Beethoven's era, long after the Baroque, so tempo was a decision and not an instruction. Opera inherits that: it isn't a story that gets sung, it's a performance, and every artist builds their own version of the character.

My mom and my grandmother had a chocolate company. Programming was my thing, but I trained as a graphic designer for the good of the family business. I don't practise design today and it still hasn't left me: I believe everything you learn ends up being useful, sooner or later.

That trade left me with a conviction — design isn't the creativity of a genius, it's technique: colour theory, theory of form, patterns. That's why I felt at home when I got to software architecture patterns: it's the same way of thinking.

When I'm not working or studying I unwind with chess and with isekai anime: I like those fantasy worlds. They almost always come from Japanese light novels, and that's where the thing that really grabs me lives — the story told from the angle of several characters, several voices at once again. The anime usually reduces it to a single point of view and something gets lost along the way, though the details of each interpretation have their own charm.

I love cats. And who doesn't? They have five days a year dedicated to them in different countries; there must be a reason, don't you think?

I work remotely and I like it that way. Connecting with people also happens online: I made my best friends playing games, thousands of kilometres apart. Distance doesn't matter when you click with someone and walk a stretch of the road together.