That, up there, is my favourite quote, from my favourite fictional character.

Oh, hi there! I am Riccardo Macoratti and am greeting you as author of these modest pages.

If you are interested, below are a few words on myself.

• Sometime in 1992

  I was born and raised between the North-West and Noth-East of Italy 🇮🇹.

• Late 2000s

  Attended a modern languages high school, one of the best choices of my life. There, I learnt fluent English 🇬🇧, current Spanish 🇪🇸 and a barely passable German 🇩🇪.

• Early to mid 2010s

  Completely switched career and went for a computer science background.

  Attended the Università Statale di Milano and earned two degrees: a bachelors' degree in Computer Science for Digital Communication (such a complex name...) and a masters' degree in Computer Science.

  In those years, I developed a passion for FOSS software, particularly the Linux world 🐧. I even attended a LUG called LinuxVar.

• Late 2010s

  Began working in a software consulting company in Milan as a back-end dev. Refined my strictly academic CS background with some on-the-job competence and real-world projects.

  Discovered that I am unable to lay too much time in my comfort zone: learned the front-end way, some light devops and a bunch of new programming languages.

• Early to mid 2020s

  Moved near the Swiss 🇨🇭 border to pursue an employment opportunity. I think it was the right choice, not only for my professional career.

  Meanwhile, I have changed a couple of employment experiences. I finally settled for the current one, which I feeld apreciates me all-around, not only for the technical competence.

Hobbies and other stuff

But what do I really like to do in my free and non-free time, you ask?

Well, let's see... First of all, I like computers, like a lot. These days I think I lost that big interest for recent hardware, and it shifted to retrocomputing.

That goes along with my second all-time passion: YouTube. I love to scavenge the platform for hours, watching new content: people restoring old computers, repairing old game console, trafficking with CRT displays, playing old games, et cetera. I could waste many, many time consuming this kind of videos. But I don't watch only stuff regarding computers. Over the years, I enjoyed science videos, documentaries, and in general watching people show their skills in some sort of craft.

Thanks to this attitude, I am very curious and like experimenting. This happened with DIY contents... By dint of watching them, I have learned some tips and tricks and I became pretty good a it. For example, I hate throwing things away when they are broken, I always try to tinker and repair them.

Last, but not least, I think I am beginning to build interest for vanlife and outdoor camping content. I love the freedom given by vanlife, although with its drawbacks, or the feeling of being completely surrounded by nature inside a tent.

Weren't you a dev?

console.log('Hello, reader!');

Yes, I am a software engineer, and I consider myself an eclectic one.

Most of my work career consisted in using Java, but that did not prevent me from using something else, once in a while. Also, that thought prompted me to learn Javascript/TypeScript, C/C++, Go, Bash, Python, et cetera.

Easter egg

Thank you for visiting this page and read a little about me. As a reward, play some Space Invaders (from The Free Video Games Project).

A worthy conclusion

That's all folks!

Enjoy the little time spent on my humble piece of web. If you want to get in touch with me or maybe report some errors, feel free to write me.