I grew up in a small town called Cassano delle Murge, near Bari, Italy.

I'll never understand why, surrounded by beautiful hills, ancient architecture, and timeless sunshine, I was looking forward to the future delivering us the reality described by William Gibson's cyberpunk stories.

I started programming at an early age, before elementary school — first in BASIC on my MSX home computer, then on a DOS PC. Compilers were rare things, at least for me, and I used DEBUG.EXE to write assembly programs. My middle school books are full of handwritten notes about 16-bit Intel assembly, which somehow was far more interesting to me than anything taught at school.

I inexplicably decided to study Latin and Greek in high school, then I chose to study Computer Engineering at university. I wrote my first kernel during that time, and Operating Systems became my favorite Computer Science topic.

I started my career as an intern at VMware in Palo Alto, where I worked on microbenchmarking virtualization extensions, at the time the newest addition to the Intel/AMD architecture. I like to remember that the first VMXON instruction my code ever executed was in 2006.

I became a virtualization expert, with strong interests in low-level programming and memory management, and since then I have orbited around the Xen ecosystem — starting at XenSource in 2007.

I worked in many fields, wherever my curiosity led me, ranging from famous companies (HP, Apple, Citrix), to the smallest of startups.

I currently live in Cambridge, UK.