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
2020
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
2019
Introduction to Complexity Santa Fe Institute
2018
Introduction to Computation Theory Santa Fe Institute
Introduction to Renormalization Santa Fe Institute
2017
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
2016
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
2015
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
2014
Machine Learning my first MOOC Stanford University
Competitive Strategy Maximilians Universität München
2007
VMware Certified Professional on VI3 (VCP310)
2003
VPN-1/Firewall-1 Management II NG
ZyXEL Certified Network Engineer
2002
CSPFA (Cisco Secure PIX Firewall Advanced)
2001
BSCN (Building Scalable Cisco Networks)
2000
CLSC (Cisco LAN Switch Configuration) Certified networking
my job experiences
An annotated scatter plot that should help visualizing my job and learning activities

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

OS2 Logo

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