My journey

My journey into web development began almost casually back in 2005, when I was just fifteen. One day, while exploring Microsoft Office, I stumbled upon a program called FrontPage 2003. Curious to find out what it was for, I opened it and soon realized it was used to create websites. That moment changed everything.

I started experimenting with it, not knowing a single line of HTML. The process felt similar to PowerPoint — you dropped content, moved things around, and suddenly something appeared on the screen. The first time I saw my own web page come to life, the sense of satisfaction was indescribable. Linking pages together, creating tables, adding images, changing colors — it all felt magical, just like a kid discovering Paint for the first time.

The First Steps (2012)

What started as a hobby eventually became my profession. In 2012, I had my first real experience in the field, collaborating with a small local web agency that developed websites using a custom CMS. Although the experience lasted only a few months, it taught me a lot about real-world development, teamwork, and the importance of structure in software projects.

Freelance Developer (2013-2017)

In 2013 I decided to move forward and I started working as a freelance developer collaborating with companies, agencies, and small businesses. It was an important step for me: I learned how to manage projects, deadlines and client relationships and I became much more aware of how much communication matters in software development.

Working closely with customers pushed me to be more precise in every aspect of the job, from the first meeting with stakeholders to the go-live of the project.

Service Lab (2014-2016)

Service Lab was the first agency I collaborated with. My task was building websites from scratch using Joomla CMS and T3 Framework, paying attention to the general UX and the responsive design, in order to optimize web pages for mobile devices. This has been a significant trigger to my career, because in Service Lab I started "being obsessed" with performance and optimization. Since smartphones were becoming crucial in our daily life, websites had to be responsive and optimized for mobile devices. Alongside a mobile-first approach to UI development, it was also important to develop products that used as few resources as possible (CSS, JavaScript and lazy images).

2015 was another important year for my career, because I was assigned a complex project - a full web stack application - to be developed from scratch. Here I discovered Laravel and it was love at first sight.

11 years later, I still use it and enjoy working with it.

SuperDesign (2015-2017)

In 2015 I started collaborating also with SuperDesign. This is where I learned how to build pixel-perfect websites and my tasks were just about front end development. It was a great boost for my professional development, because I had the chance to level up my CSS and JavaScript/jQuery skills.

Moving into the Enterprise World (2017-2026)

After four years as a freelancer, I decided to join a company as a full-time developer.

There were two main reasons behind this choice: I wanted to work in a team sharing the same goals and I was tired of constantly looking for clients on my own.

Axélero (2017 - 2018)

In February 2017 I joined Axélero - a company which made tailored websites - as a full stack developer.

The first project I worked on was a PHP back end application that downloaded and saved into a database emails of a third party service: the goal was to archive emails - which had a 30 days due date - to make them available for the advisory people.

The second project was the assets manager. It was basically an application used for assigning and managing assets (smartphone, tablets, computers, cars and so on) to employees and collaborators.

The game changer of my career was the Axélero's CRM: a SPA written in React.js and Redux that fetched and rendered data by consuming REST APIs. The application provided a complete view of each customer’s information, including payments, contracts and contacts. This was a turning point in my career. It was my first experience with modern frontend development and gave me the opportunity to explore a field that would eventually become my main area of work.

I also worked on a React Native mobile application.

The goal was to evaluate whether a mobile application could help the company’s resellers in their work, but it was never published. Still, it was a valuable experience: I had the opportunity to explore something different and discover how straightforward it could be to build mobile applications using React and JavaScript.

MotorK (2018-2023)

In 2018 I joined MotorK as front end developer. My experience here can be divided into two main phases.

2018-2020

During the first two years, I developed Vue.js applications: both SPA with Vuex and Vue Router, and simple applications to embed in the SaaS product of the company.

In the meanwhile I also worked on the company's design system, by following the Atomic Design Pattern, in order to provide to developers components - written both in PHP and Vue.js - to build consistent user interfaces based on a set of shared rules and behaviours. As always, it was a great experience because I had never worked on a design system and never used Storybook before.

2020-2023

In 2020, the company decided to rebuild its main product from scratch, and I joined the new team as a front end engineer. The product had grown considerably over the years, and contributions from many developers had made the architecture increasingly difficult to maintain. The rebuild was an opportunity to address the technical debt, improve performance and establish a more solid foundation for the future.

We started by choosing a modern, lightweight stack:

We also implemented advanced optimization techniques such as: Critical CSS, code splitting, dynamic loading of chunks and Intersection Observer, to improve TBT, FCP and CLS and to serve as few files as possible. The goal was to load only the resources that were immediately needed and defer everything else.

Career break (2024)

At the end of 2023, after five intense years at MotorK, I decided to take a career break. For four months, I stepped away from professional work to recharge, study and work on a personal project. It was a useful opportunity to slow down and think about the direction I wanted to take next.

Vivaticket (May 2024 - Present)

In May 2024 I joined Vivaticket, a company that provides online ticketing services for sports events, concerts, exhibitions and amusement parks, as front end engineer.

My first task was about optimizing and fixing the front end part of the main site, in order to simplify the user experience and improve performance.

Later, I worked for a few weeks on the company's CMS, a tool used to manage the editorial content published on the website. The CMS is a SPA written in Vue.js, Vuex and Vue Router; Vuetify is the UI library chosen for developing the user interface.

I also contributed on an interactive SeatMap designed for stadiums, theaters, or rooms, allowing users to book seats. The project is entirely written in TypeScript without relying on any frameworks.