About

Hi, I’m Raffaele, born in 1980 in Grosseto, graduated as a surveyor and always passionate about programming.

The beginning

I have cultivated a passion for programming since the age of 14, when I was given the first personal computer: Commodore 64. After a few months of pleasant use of videogames, supplied in cassettes, I began to develop an irresistible curiosity about how they worked and how to recreate them. At the time, the internet did not yet exist, or at least not as we know it today, and retrieving information was definitely much more difficult. But between the manual attached to the box and the few texts available in the municipal libraries, I was able to begin my journey, without end, in a world full of exciting surprises, discoveries and satisfactions.

The first experience

In 1996 I developed my very first and primitive videogame in “basic” language, which I named “Labirint”. Influenced by role-playing games, I wanted to recreate a labyrinth, what today are nicknamed dangeons (rougue-like). To draw the walls I took advantage of the symbols made available by the tables of special characters. The character, represented by a simple letter, could move, using the joystick, inside the labyrinth, encountering enemies, traps and treasures. I structured it in 3 levels, the first two were classic labyrinths, while the last was a battlefield in which to face the final enemy, also represented by a letter that “fired” bullets, also represented by symbols, against the character who, trying to avoid them, had to get close enough to hit him and then defeat him. Although the graphics were extremely simple and spartan, I felt proud to have created a program of thousands of lines of code. It took me months to complete it, but I will never forget the days spent designing it (at least 2 or 3 notebooks) and the nights of writing code after code. At the time everything was saved on tape and more than once I had to start over due to malfunctions of the media; this however taught me the value of backups.

We are serious

In 1999 I was lucky enough to receive a PC, 16bit 80386 processor, with the old Windows 3.1 operating system from Microsoft, as a gift from a surveyor with whom I was doing training. So I started to research which were the most used programming languages ​​and I came across C ++ (programming language invented by Bjarne Stroustrup). I bought several books: one dedicated entirely to the C ++ language (which I fell in love with), one on object-oriented programming, one on software engineering and one on C. Object-oriented programming was a real and stimulating exercise for the mind, at every chapter I devoured filled myself with ideas and problems to solve. Completed the self-taught training phase I applied what I learned on the first project with C ++: StairWay. My program was intended to solve a tedious task that I had to do during my internship with a Building Engineer, that of drawing sections and reinforcement of reinforced concrete stairs in AutoCAD. Nothing was more boring, especially because it was repetitive and often the subsequent works differed from the previous ones for small things that made you waste a lot of time between checks and various resizing. My little program had the burden of drawing in dxf (textual format of AutoCAD, of which I found the protocols in the advanced manual that I will soon be an Architect) the section of the staircase starting from the measurements of the single step and of the landing, complete with relative exploded views of the irons indicating the quantity to put in them and the diameter. There was also no lack of dimensions and related textual indications. Unfortunately, I did not use it much, despite its attractive graphics, with detailed drawings and instructions for use, I had to put it aside when I came out with the new version of the operating system from Microsoft, on which my program did not work due to incompatibility. Unfortunately, I never found the time to update it.

Communities and teamwork

My passion for programming also gives me many friendships and many opportunities for discussion, including conferences and fairs that took place around Italy. My favorite annual stops were Florence and Rome, where I met people with boundless visions, sometimes bordering on science fiction. A real philosophy of life that they called “open source”. The concept of free code, which has nothing to do with working for free, seemed to be the new workhorse of the computer community. Fascinated and influenced by this current, I approached the new operating system that represented the apex of the iceberg: Linux. A versatile, free, open and manipulable operating system: I had found a real treasure. It goes without saying that I immediately left Windows to move to a significantly higher platform. Those were years of collaborations, of design and development in groups, I learned the methodologies, new languages ​​(Javascript, PHP, Java, SQL, Joy, sh, ML, Perl, Ruby, etc.), advanced techniques, precautions that were required to work on big projects as an integral part of a monstrously large group, of which you often did not know everyone, and honestly I knew very few live. Most of the communications were carried out via email or chat, a sort of project manager established the part of the code that each member had to develop, indicating parameters to be received and results to be returned. It was not uncommon to work on algorithms of which neither the place where it would end nor the program that would exploit it was known.

Reflective pause

In 2005, perhaps unfortunately or perhaps fortunately, I officially opened my business as a surveyor, complete with registration in the Register, office with trainee, tools, etc. I had to return to the use of Windows, which excelled among the operating systems for most professional software, such as AutoCAD, DocFA, PreGEO, Primus, etc. For a few years I left the IT world to devote myself full time to the work of a surveyor, which I liked anyway and gave me beautiful things, but also some scratch marks. I limited myself to planning a few personal projects during the evening, when after a whole day between customers, public institutions and bureaucracy, I was definitely in pieces and spent a few hours immersed in programming that helped me relax.

A passion that becomes work

A few years later I met a new opportunity, a company from Grosseto had to develop an online management program in PHP for a transport company. This time, for the first time, I found myself again in the world of programming with a lot of pay. It was the first time I got paid to spend hours doing what I liked best. It is difficult to explain the sensations of the situation, for me that programming was a game, a relaxation, a passion, what at the time was defined as a hobby, it was literally a contradiction, it is as if as a child I had been paid to play, or as if they paid me to eat or sleep. I never thought it could become an economic source. Designed and built without difficulty. From this point on, I made myself available on the market, I embarked on the path of marketing to make myself known, then I studied the most popular texts on the subject of communication and on how to effectively present a product or service. This last topic, although indispensable, came completely out of the programming field and I began to realize that by transforming a passion into a job I wouldn’t really spend my days “playing”, but there would be many other aspects far from it. how relaxing. The following years were tiring, very tiring, because on the one hand I was a surveyor and on the other I made programs and sites. A real inner conflict accompanied me for years, I did not want to give up either of the two activities and therefore I cultivated both, following the principle that “I will have eternity after death to rest” and “life is passion and only with passions can I really lives “.

Digireturn

World economic crisis they called it, we still experience its effects and consequences that have remained unchanged in recent years and now more than overcome, considered it part of the system and the human ability to get used to anything has made it the new reality. The fact is that with the construction crisis, within a few years, the surveyor’s activity was strongly affected and I had to, with regret, make an important decision which then led me to close the technical office and open the activity as a programmer.
The rest of my story I still have to live before I can write it… to be continued!