30 years of passion for technology
In memory of Nicolò Calia — mentor, entrepreneur and friend. He believed in me when I was a curious young man and invested in my growth. Without him, this journey would not have been possible.
It all started in 1993, when as a curious young man I joined a company working with IBM AS/400 systems. My job was to install PCs for connecting to those big machines, but my curiosity went far beyond that. In my spare time I taught myself one of the first visual programming languages, Borland Delphi.
Within a year, things changed. I had migrated the entire company network to Novell 4 and was writing small programs in Delphi and then Visual Basic to import and export data from the AS/400s. In the following months I dedicated myself to network systems — OS/2, Windows NT and all subsequent versions — while continuing to develop software for the companies I worked for.
During those years I was fortunate to meet a great mentor: Nicolò Calia. A visionary entrepreneur, he believed in me and invested in my professional growth. Through his company I worked as a system administrator and programmer for several important organizations. To Nicolò, who recently passed away, I owe much of who I am today.
In 1999 I took my first big leap: with two friends I co-founded Flyweb Informatica. There I continued to grow as a system administrator and web developer, developing a passion for Linux to manage servers and deepening my knowledge of databases like MySQL alongside the DB2 I already knew. In 2001 we launched TiVuTiBi.com, a social photo voting site — in an era when social networks didn't yet exist, it was a big novelty and achieved significant success in Italy, at least until Facebook arrived.
In 2005 I left the company to go freelance and returned to collaborating with Nicolò Calia, managing enterprise networks for prestigious companies. It was a period of consolidating my system administration expertise.
Then came 2009 and an unexpected turn. As a heavy smoker, I discovered electronic cigarettes — a market that in Italy was still entirely uncharted. I founded Maia Commerce srl and created what became Italy's first online store for electronic cigarettes, achieving great success. During those years I developed deep expertise in e-commerce, SEO, importing from China, warehouse management and invoicing. Over the next five years I launched the youcigarette.it franchise brand, opening numerous stores in both Italy and Spain — all managed by software I had built myself. Unfortunately, tobacco product legislation forced me to close both the website and the stores.
So I returned to my true passion: pure technology. I worked as a freelancer until 2016, when I reconnected with a former colleague and together we founded Doloop srls. During those years I worked as project manager and developer: we built warehouse management software for shipping companies, CRMs for contract management, tablet order-taking applications with connections to various accounting software, e-commerce platforms, and even wrote an ERP with integrated accounting.
At the end of 2025 I left Doloop. I felt I had too little freedom in choosing which projects to work on, and the advent of artificial intelligence had freed me from needing a company structure behind me to bring them to life. And here I am: an independent consultant, still hungry for technology, still searching for the next project.
“Every day a new project, every project a new challenge”