Education and Working Paths
Born at 327. I’m an open source and Linux enthusiast hacker since 1996, a Linux senior DevOps, a Developer, Cloud, Web, Data Science and Machine Learning passionate, with a strong musical, mathematical and networking background. That’s a bit unusual mix of interests and experiences I guess.
I live and work in Nice, in the south east of France, since 2008.
I was born and raised in Torino, in north west of Italy, and I did all my schooling in this town. Besides being a student at the Conservatoire of Music "G.Verdi", I also did fairly well in school. So I had my Bachelor of Music-Piano Performance in 1993 (class of Maestro Domenico Canina) and a Master of Mathematics degree at the Università degli Studi in 1999, with emphasis in Computer Science, Mathematical and Graphics programming, Cryptography, and Artificial Intelligence. Research thesis: "Algorithms for Searching Saddle Points in Convex Analysis and their application to the Monotonic, Regular and Optimized interpolation."
Having worked for over twenty years, I began to feel as though my knowledge about many interesting things was fading out, so I decided it was time for reinvention. Then I heard about MOOCs – Massive Online Open Courses, and a specific one turned out appealing to me: “Machine Learning”, from Coursera-Standford University, nicely taught by Andrew Ng.
Therefore, in 2014 I fell in love with online training via MOOCs. My main objective at the beginning was learning about interesting subjects from some top-notch universities, like MIT, Harvard, Berkeley, Chicago, Yale or Stanford, and I also wanted to live the experience of collaborative learning, though I did not have a clear strategy. However, after the first MOOC I started to plan ahead.
Since then, step by step and week by week, I successfully completed several MOOCs (and dropped many too), and as a result I am learning a couple of things about Machine Learning, Data Science, Maths, Functional/Object Oriented/Parallel and GPGPU Programming, Cloud Computing, DevOps Technologies, Web Technologies, Learning Technics, and so on. More recently I added Health and Climate Science related courses to my learning objectives.
Certifications and Online Courses
2021| Introduction to GitOps (LFS169) — Linux Foundation |
| Urban Nature: Connecting Cities, Nature and Innovation — Lund University |
| Greening the Economy: Sustainable Cities — Lund University |
| Greening the Economy: Lessons from Scandinavia environment — Lund University |
| Giving Helpful Feedback management — University of Colorado Boulder |
| Understanding Dementia — The Wicking Demence Centre, University of Tasmania |
| Introduction to solar cells solar technology — Technical University of Danemark |
| Preventing Dementia — The Wicking Demence Centre, University of Tasmania |
| Science Matter: Let's Talk about COVID-19 — Imperial College London |
| Global Warming: The Science and Modeling of Climate Change earth science — The University of Chicago |
| Air Pollution health science — København Universitet |
| Introduction to Complexity — Santa Fe Institute |
| Introduction to Computation Theory — Santa Fe Institute |
| Introduction to Renormalization — Santa Fe Institute |
| Introduction to Cloud Infrastructure Technologies (LFS151.x) — Linux Foundation |
| Fundamentals of Containers, Kubernetes, and Red Hat OpenShift (DO081x) — Red Hat |
| Introduction to Cloud Foundry and Cloud Native Software Architecture (LFS132.x) — Linux Foundation |
| Introduction to OpenStack (LFS152.x) — Linux Foundation |
| Introduction to Kubernetes (LFS158.x) — Linux Foundation |
| Introduction to DevOps: Transforming and Improving Operations (LFS161.x) DevOps — Linux Foundation |
| Fractals and Scaling — Santa Fe Institute |
| Compliance Basics for Developers (LFC291) — The Linux Foundation |
| Introduction to MongoDB using the MEAN Stack (M101x) — MongoDB University |
| Functional Programming Principles in Scala Scala — École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne |
| Front-End Web Developer Nanodegree (5 courses) — at&t, Google, GitHub, Hack Reactor |
| Introduction to Dynamical Systems and Chaos math — Santa Fe Institute |
| AWS Training - AWS Technical Essentials (version August 2016) AWS — Amazon Web Services |
| Advanced Styling with Responsive Design — University of Michigan |
| MongoDB for Node.js Developers (M101JS) MongoDB — MongoDB University |
| Full Stack Web Development Specialization (6 courses) — The Hong Kong University |
| Introduction to TypeScript (DEV201x) — Microsoft |
| Introduction to jQuery (DEV208x) — Microsoft |
| Shaping up with Angular.js Angular — Code School & Google |
| Using Databases with Python — University of Michigan |
| Paradigms of Computer Programming (2 courses) — Université catholique de Louvain |
| Introduction to HTML5 — University of Michigan |
| Responsive Website Basics: Code with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript — University of London |
| Using Python to Access Web Data — University of Michigan |
| Cloud Network — University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign |
| Cloud Computing Applications cloud — University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign |
| Statistics and R for Life Sciences (PH525.1x) — Hardvard University |
| Introduction to R Programming (DAT204x) — Microsoft |
| Learn HTML5 from W3C web programming — W3C |
| Data Science Specialization (first 6 courses) R — The Johns Hopkins University |
| Introduction to Java Programming - part 2 (COMP102.2x) — The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology |
| Introduction to Programming with Java Part 1: Starting to Program in Java (IT.1.1x) java — Universidad Carlos III de Madrid |
| How to Learn: powerful mental tools to help you master tough subjects — University of California, San Diego |
| Big Data XSeries Certificate (2 courses) big data — Berkeley University & Databricks |
| Heterogeneous Parallel Programming — University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign |
| Introduction à la programmation orientée objet en C++ — École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne |
| Optimisation Stochastique Évolutionnaire — Université de Strasbourg |
| Machine Learning my first MOOC — Stanford University |
| Competitive Strategy — Maximilians Universität München |
| VMware Certified Professional on VI3 (VCP310) |
| VPN-1/Firewall-1 Management II NG |
| ZyXEL Certified Network Engineer |
| CSPFA (Cisco Secure PIX Firewall Advanced) |
| BSCN (Building Scalable Cisco Networks) |
| CLSC (Cisco LAN Switch Configuration) Certified networking |
Software Engineer — DevOps
In May 2020 I moved to a new position as Software Engineer at Qwant, focusing mainly on Continuous integration with GitLab CI and Continuous deployment on Kubernetes with Helm, ArgoCD/Argo Workflows technologies.
Site Reliability Engineer
I started working in september 2017 at Qwant, the French startup company that develops the eponymous web search engine that respects the user's privacy. I've worked as Site Reliability Engineer with an expertise in the Infrastructure as Code good practices and technologies (centered around the SaltStack framework), Docker containerization, and Python programming.
Auto-entrepreneuriship
I became an auto-entrepreneur in 2013 (SIRET: 79212659100025). My projects are mainly focused on Linux embedded (operating system and multimedia on the Raspberry Pi), on networking and AWS cloud technologies and on Full Stack and MEAN stack web development.
Monitoring Architect and Team Leader
I switched in october 2011 to a very enriching job as Nagios/Centreon monitoring architect, developer, and team leader of the Nagios monitoring team (France and Poland) at IBM La Gaude. I ended my job experience at IBM in june 2014.
Linux and VMware Certified Engineer
Between 2007 and 2011 I worked at IBM Italy and than IBM France as a Linux and VMware system administrator in high pressure working environments. In particular at IBM SSO France, I was assigned on multiple client Linux support and gained incident management, compliance and process skills in a very strict ITIL and GDF environment.
Linux distribution developer
My primary technological interest since 1999 is studying and hacking the Linux environment and playing with the latest open source technologies.
Between 2003 and 2006 I had a wonderful experience as a Linux distribution developer and team leader (QiLinux distribution) which involved me into many different activities, ranging from the conception, creation from sources and integration of all the pieces and technologies of a modern Linux distribution to the software development, debugging and compliance with the available standards. Since 2007 I started developing on the openmamba GNU/Linux distribution with roots in the discontinued QiLinux distribution but which has quickly moved to a fully independent project.
Network WAN Engineer
In 1999 I started to work in the private IT and Telecommunication sectors as Cisco WAN Engineer. Between 2001 and 2003 I worked at the Atlanet Internet Service Provider (now part of British Telecom) in the Network Delivery team and gained in-depth Cisco technology knowledge in network planning, implementing, configuring, troubleshooting and testing of MPLS (Multiprotocol Label Switching) networking systems.
TeX Developer
My very first job experience (1998-1999) was the development of a collection of TeX macros and document styles written in pure plainTeX language for the Academy of Science of Torino. The aim of this project was to create a document style to easily write Mathematics and Physics papers in plainTeX, but with the Microsoft Word Look&Feel (sic!), because other academic people unfortunately made use of this second typetting tool to redact their papers and we didn't want to see any visual differences in the final rendered document. The most difficult part was impletementing a complete support for the TrueType fonts, not natively available under plainTeX.
You can see the code in my GitHub repository.
When I’m not working, I spend my time studying, taking MOOC’s, playing with my dog Pixi, listening lots of classical music, taking care of my plants (crassulaceae, succulents and cactaceae) reading books, travelling a bit when possible, and developing some open source projects.
My preferred composers are (at present, it's somewhat fluctuating over the time) Johann Sebastian Bach, Gustav Mahler, Anton Bruckner, Arnold Schoenberg, Alban Berg, and Dmitri Shostakovich. As you can maybe guess from this list, I particular love symphonic and polyphonic music. But my preferred "classical" piece is perhaps the crystalline Five movements for string quartet, op. 5 of Anton Webern.
Some books I've recently read:
- Ralentir ou périr ─ L'économie de la décroissance, Timothée Parrique
- L'amore è una cosa meravigliosa (original title: A many ─ splendoured thing), Han Suyin
- Può la barca affondare l'acqua? ─ Vita dei contadini cinesi, Chen Guidi, Wu Chuntao
- La relativité dans dans tous ces états ─ Au-delà de l'espace-temps, Laurent Nottale
- Dance to the tune of life ─ Biological Relativity, Denis Noble
- Twilight of Democracy ─ The Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism, Anne Applebaum
- L'âge des low tech ─ Vers une civilisation techniquement soutenable, Philippe Bihouix
- L'epopea di Gilgameš, Sîn-lēqi-unninni
- Against the Grain, James C. Scott
- Helgoland, Carlo Rovelli
- Spillover, L'evoluzione delle pandemie, David Quammen
- Six Degrees, our future on a hotter planet, Mark Lynas
- Sync, Steven Strogatz
- Scale, Geoffrey West
- Une vie, Simone Veil
- Global Warming ─ Understanding the Forecast, David Archer
- Destined for War ─ Can America and China escape Thucydides's trap?, Graham Allison
- Doughnut Economics, Kate Raworth
- A Beginner's Guide to Mathematial Logic, Raymond M. Sullvan
- Half Earth ─ Our Planet's Fight for Life, Edward O. Wilson
- Optimism over Despair, Noam Chomsky
