When my dad said: “Roberto, do you want an ‘electronic brain’ [an ‘80s Italian synonym for computer]?”, I was a bit scary while figuring myself as the anime hero “Neo-Human Casshan”. Instead, a brand new PC-10 Commodore landed on my desk, with two 5¼ floppies and 256k of RAM. That’s how it started: at first copying sources from software magazines, then plotting fractals in GW-BASIC, finally the C and nerd groups at the Lycee - brilliant students now working abroad.

I was already a student of the Faculty of Mathematics in Rome when a friend stumbled on my door with a bunch of floppies: the foresight of my parents allowed me to install my first GNU/Linux endangering the family PC. Everything went fine, and I built my first kernel. I got involved in my hometown (Latina) LUG participated by many of my future colleagues, and set up a small LAN to save internet fares.

In 2002 - after my degree with a thesis on algebraic curves - I decided to make a job from my lifelong passion: working in the open-source world to innovative solutions, to bring a real social progress.

I began as a consultant for a Alenia Spazio in Turin, managing an High Performance Cluster unix hosts and starting the migration to GNU/Linux. Meanwhile I took part to the first movements for the copyleft and the adoption of FLOSS in the public sector.

In 2005 I joined Par-Tec, where I worked in different roles: system integrator, project manager, community manager and lately Solutions Architect. I enjoy planning and implementing big IT infrastructures, helping customers to adopt open-source solutions for cloud platforms and PaaS.

In these years I contributed to infrastructure projects like Ansible, Openstack and caldav4j - java implementation of RFC 4791 - and was invited as a speaker and trainer to various Italian and European conferences, like Community Leadership Summit Italy and EuroPython.

When the Team contacted me for the interview I was really excited because its mission summarizes my life goal: an efficient administration through free software, for knowledge sharing.

After this experience I’ll return in Par-Tec as a full-time employee and helping my colleagues who are taking care of all by workload. I’m really grateful to my employer for allowing me a part-time job which is fully compatible with my role in the team.

I’m happy to do my part and catch this great opportunity to serve my country: so that my three kids won’t be forced to move away, and be free to stay.