About me

The short version

I am Giuseppe Rega. I started writing code professionally in 2022 and never stopped writing it outside work either. By day I build enterprise Azure applications for INAIL, the Italian workplace insurance authority, through Accenture; in the evening I build complete systems and ship them to a Raspberry Pi sitting in my home — where I get to learn the things a corporate environment quite rightly does not let you get wrong.

How I got here

I studied electronic engineering at Politecnico di Torino and stopped halfway, at ninety credits out of a hundred and eighty. It is not the part of my CV I hide: it is the part that explains the rest. I closed the gaps by building things. Not by reading about microservice architecture, but by designing one, getting it wrong, and finding out first-hand that keeping the contracts between eleven services in agreement costs more than writing them.

Before that there was the Nunziatella, a military secondary school, which teaches mainly two things: that organisation beats improvisation, and that your choices land on the workload of the people next to you. It is probably why I write comments in my code.

The Red Cross

I volunteer with the Italian Red Cross. I have worked road accidents and cardiac arrests. I do not mention it for colour: it is the reason that when a deployment goes wrong at eleven at night, it is not a crisis. It is a problem, it has a cause, and the cause is found by reading logs rather than the calendar.

It taught me something else that matters more to this job than it sounds: how to talk to someone who is struggling and needs to understand on the first attempt. That is exactly the skill required to explain to a client why their idea, as specified, will cost them three times as much.

How I work

Problem first, stack second. If the right answer is an existing platform and half a day of configuration, I will say so. Selling development that is not needed is a good way to have a client exactly once.

What I hand over runs in production. Not “works on my machine”: containerised, with automated deployment, HTTPS, logging, and a way to notice when it breaks. That is the difference between a prototype and a system, and it is where half the real work lives.

I write for whoever reads it next. Code is read far more often than it is written, frequently by me six months later. Comments explain why a decision was made, not what the line below does.

I say when I do not know. It is faster than finding out together halfway through the project.

Outside work

I run, I read more non-fiction than novels, and I have a weakness for problems that look simple until you open them: full-text search on PostgreSQL, time zones, and offline synchronisation. Those three have taught me more than any course.