About

Who am I?

My name is Paolo Riccardi and I’ve been a Computer Science enthusiast since childhood. I knew I was hooked in from the moment when, as a child, I saw for the first time the blinking, boxy cursor of my older brother’s Commodore 64.

I switched from Logo and Basic to Pascal and electric guitars in High School, then I discovered Slackware and fell in love with Linux and Open Source and more broadly with Hacking as a mindset.

While at University I started using regularly C and Java, which were joined over the years by Php, Objective C and Python (revived by the use of pyspark over the last years) and last but definitely not least, Go with a little help from the amazing Learning Go. To be honest with Go it wasn’t love at first sight, expecially because I came from a very long experience with a rather forgiving language such as Python but, after the initial impact, Go has become the language of choice for my pet projects.

While at University I discovered distributed systems under the form of process calculus and concurrency theory. Although under a less theoretical perspective, distributed systems are still nowadays my favourite area of technical expertise, often paired with data intensive sytems.

Over the years, before I knew it, my passion became my full time job. Now I live in Tuscany (Italy), where I graduated in Computer Science (BS & MS) and where I work as Solution Architect for a consulting company focused on data mangament, data processing, data analysis and more broadly using data to bring value to enterprises.

Reach out

I no longer keep my personal contact information on this page, so should you need to reach out, you can visit my Linkedin profile and drop me a message or ask me my personal contacts there.

What else?

I like to tease my brain whenever possible, I’m an avid reader expecially of History and Science books.

I currently hold a third dan black belt in Aikido and I’m a certified instructor, if you want to know more on this topic you can visit my blog (mainly in italian) or my video channel on Vimeo.

I love cooking, hiking and taking photographs, you can watch some of my shots on my Flickr photo gallery.