About

I'm Federico, an Italian engineer near The Hague. I've spent fifteen years building software across startups, service teams, and my own independent practice, and somewhere along the way I stopped being a specialist in anything; I know that can sound like a weakness, but it's rather the job I do best: holding the whole picture while the specialists are looking at their part of it.

I started in Italy, translating designs to HTML and building apps on social media, then went independent for three years; discovery calls, architecture, sales, implementation, everything. Those years taught me that the hard part of software is deciding what to build. Shipping, you learn.

Safara is where leadership found me, more than the other way around. I joined as employee number one and built the product with the CTO in under six months; when he left, engineering was mine, alone, until I onboarded his successor shortly before launch. Taking leadership by necessity taught me plenty; giving it back well taught me more. Togehter, we owned the continuity through the COVID freeze, and after the acquisition, they called me back to bring the platform to life again.

At Think-it, over five years, leadership became the craft itself. I grew a domain of forty engineers into a self-organised ensemble, and my job was rarely setting goals for teams (they do that themselves) and mostly being the guardrail that elevates them. The work ranged wide, from data enablement with automotive behemoths to vision definition with purposeful NGOs, and that breadth was the point, really.

The last stretch has been Kaphera, Think-it's spin-off on data-collaboration governance, where the threads came together: company and product vision, business model, the roadmap for a managed platform, an d an open source strategy now unfolding. The spin-off itself was the interesting problem, really; creating a separate company is easy, the hard part is shaping two organisations that feed each other, consultancy learnings flowing into the product, the product's reach opening doors for the consultancy. Building that bridge was work of a different kind: less engineering, less leading, more designing how organisations hold together.

If there's one belief underneath all of it, it's that collaboration is positive-sum when trust is structured well; building those structures is my work. In teams, it looks like people setting their own goals, with leadership as a balance of skills and empathy. In code, it looks like building in the open, together; open source earns trust from the people who'll one day depend on your work, and invites the scrutiny that makes it better. In data, it looks like sharing what you know without surrendering control of it. I know positive-sum can read as idealism, and maybe that's the point; it sorts for the people who'll actually care, and it has been, so far, my most reliable strategy.

This is where I write as I go: leadership, technology, building in the open.

If what you read resonates with you, I'd love to talk.