From technology enthusiast to web developer
The journey that, through technology, has brought me to the present ⌛
The Beginnings
I grew up surrounded by technology from childhood thanks to my father, who introduced me to my first personal computer. I remember we still had ADSL with Alice, a family PC running Windows XP, and those iconic grey speakers with green LEDs. During that time, we started using computers in elementary school - during computer class, our task was to complete drawings in Paint, after which we could use the internet to browse gioco.it or other Flash game websites. I immediately became fascinated with this world. Over the years, curious about the mechanisms I couldn't see - those behind the scenes - I started tinkering more deeply, breaking Windows 7, then 8 and 8.1, and so on countless times. A funny story I always like to tell is that during the last years of elementary school, around 2009-2010, two childhood friends and I would bring a USB stick containing the client for a private Metin2 server (LocMt2). Somehow, after the obligatory Paint drawing, we were allowed to play this way.
At home with internet access, I discovered forums, scattered online communities, and the first Italian YouTube channels. The most memorable one I think was Milleaccendini, who at the time focused on magic and made videos (very professional for that time) about various tricks and explanations. In middle school, I met many new friends, and one of them introduced me to Yotobi on YouTube with the video "GAME REVIEW - BIG RIGS". From there, I started getting passionate about the Italian community that was just emerging at the time.
The Discovery of Modding
During middle school, I began to discover the hardware world. I started frequenting forums like Inforge (formerly CheatForge), international YouTube channels, and found myself acquiring increasingly advanced knowledge and skills, especially for that age. I discovered various components and how they work in symbiosis, technical details and nomenclature for analyzing PC performance, and so on. During the same period, I stumbled upon video game modding, first with GTA San Andreas, then with Minecraft, GTA IV, realizing the boundless potential it could bring to video games.
The period at the end of middle school and beginning of high school (mid-2013) was when I started, almost like a divine calling, to get my hands dirty trying to build something of my own. One of the first things I remember was when I managed to insert a photo of my friend onto a shirt in GTA San Andreas using some tools. That's when I started to realize how malleable reality (digital at that moment) could be if you knew the right tools. I continued my technical tinkering by unpacking the Hill Climb Racing APK and inserting my friends' faces on the train passengers, or creating Minecraft Resource Packs (called Texture Packs at the time) with face swaps of my friends on various mobs, or memorable photos in place of paintings.
All this led me to decide that I wanted to be a programmer. After all, one of my best friends, one of those who carried the USB stick to school with me, had already been programming private Metin2 servers for a couple of years and was starting to do some commissioned web work. I really liked the idea, but I couldn't understand anything he was doing and didn't have the precocious mindset to be so interested in the subject.
The First Attempt at Programming
At the end of middle school, when it was time to choose which high school to attend, I decided without much reflection to go to a commercial school, as it was the only one that promised good technical skills based also on programming, which had become my greatest aspiration at the time. During this period, while continuously increasing my knowledge and passion for the tech and gaming world, I realized that I really enjoyed modifying videos and paying attention to post-production details. Over time, I started studying this subject too, building knowledge about recording equipment, support equipment, etc. All of this, combined with having a sound engineer and musician father, meant that willingly or not, over the years I learned some technical aspects of audio as well, which perfectly matched my passion for videos.
In my third year of high school, choosing the 'Business Information Systems' educational path, I realized that what I hoped would become my greatest passion turned out to be quite the opposite. The teachers' way of explaining, the Italianized vocabulary of technical terms, and the hyper-antiquated technologies slowly drove me away from this dream. It was 2016: I clearly remember the PCs with Windows 7 and Visual Basic 2008, an awful forcing to learn a stack completely dislocated in time and far from real-world needs.
The only thing that made sense to learn was C++, but by then programming seemed like something that wasn't for me.
Towards the end of high school, I thought I had found my path in videomaking. I was learning After Effects and various advanced editing techniques. The breakthrough seemed to come with a project for the school's open day: an explanatory video about the school themed around Super Mario which, despite the difficulties, we managed to complete in a month.
After graduation, I started working on commission: I created an animation for an intro starting from a single PDF logo (I still have nightmares thinking about it) and made a wedding video that, after a month of work and endless revisions, only earned me €150.
Late 2018, I tried to enroll in the Academy of Fine Arts in Palermo: I ranked 52nd out of 50 available spots. I continued working as I could until late 2019, when in November I moved to Rome to attend the Academy of Fine Arts in via Ripetta. In February 2020, with the pandemic looming, I found myself in a difficult situation: traditional study wasn't for me and I couldn't get interested in the subjects, so I decided to quit everything and return to Sicily. Realizing how difficult it was to build a career as a self-made videomaker without connections, at the end of 2020 I decided to completely stop with videomaking as well.
The Unexpected Turn
A nice parenthesis I want to tell about happens in 2019 when I met a friend who was very good with Cyber Security and worked as a penetration tester. He was the person who opened my eyes to a completely new world. He was the first person I met who used Linux as their main operating system, and slowly he introduced me to the whole universe of Open Source and networking. He taught me small terminal tricks like "command !!" to repeat the last command or using grep to search in files, things I take for granted today. He introduced me to the real basics of Linux, so much so that I was convinced to install Elementary OS 5.0 on my Zenbook of the time. It was like discovering a new way of seeing and using the computer.
In 2021, I found myself without ideas, without work, without a path, during a pandemic lockdown playing Apex Legends every single day. In October, my whole family got COVID and I found myself segregated in my grandmother's house alone with my entire gaming setup mounted on a rickety table with cables in the air.
One day I was talking on Discord with a friend who was taking a web developer course in his spare time, saying he wanted to learn something while finishing university. I don't know exactly what it was, but it was as if I remembered everything I used to do as a kid and how disappointed I was at school, all at once. So I decided to buy the exact same course and thought "well, what do I have to lose..."
When I started the course, for the first time in many years, I felt an extraordinary excitement. Every time I learned a piece, every time something took shape under my hands, I felt that sense of omnipotence I experienced as a child modifying games randomly.
During the course, I also remember a wonderful specific moment of my life: a message I received from the friend who had always been programming, on Google Chats, during a random day in my first year of high school. At the time, GTA V had just come out and I remember not having the money to buy it. I remembered exactly how it was, so I immediately went to look for it to see if Google Chats still existed at least.
And there it was, in all its glory:
It was as if after so many years, all my knowledge, my passions, my interests were coming together, starting from a spiral, to a single point.
The Journey into Web Development
I continued studying throughout 2022. During this period, I also managed to acquire an elusive Raspberry Pi 4 from England, which after customs blocks, various assistance, and afternoons spent trying to get it to me, I transformed into a HomeLab. It took me about a month to learn Docker and configure everything: AdGuard Home, Portainer, Wireguard, qBittorrent and other self-hosted services. I managed to make everything work with custom subdomains thanks to Cloudflare and Nginx Proxy Manager to manage the various subdomains of my server.
Among other things, in 2022 I created my first ambitious website, completely static but it was the first time I made an idea reality - the website for my Minecraft server. I built it with HTML, Bootstrap, and a bit of JavaScript to add original Minecraft sounds to the buttons. I had a much more complex project in mind: a system where users could manage their profile, choose custom skins, receive in-game rewards, and even chat from the web with those online on the server. I created the landing page with the team section and registration forms, albeit without a backend. Not coincidentally, I decided to keep it online right on the raspberry.
After this experience, I started refining my knowledge of NextJS 12. My childhood friend (the one from Metin2 and Google Chats) recommended it because it was a complete framework that handled both frontend and backend, with features like Page Router, API routes, and Incremental Static Regeneration, saving me from going crazy with a thousand different configurations. After the "Web Developer Course" from Zero To Mastery, I followed another specific one on NextJS from the same platform, always keeping the official documentation open because I realized how different it was from a normal React project. It wasn't easy at all: I had to better understand how React itself worked to comprehend the data flow in components, and I found myself multiple times dealing with hydration problems or studying how to handle markdown parsing through remark for Portfolio posts.
With everything I had learned, I created my first serverless site: a homepage with bio and photos, plus a portfolio section where each project had its card with an image leading to the dedicated page. I added JWT authentication using Edge Functions for an eventual mini CMS to manage the database and images, which remained incomplete. I configured everything to get images from an AWS S3 bucket and markdown content from MongoDB Atlas.
Evolution with NextJS
In September 2022, while I was still working on it, I started sending resumes around through Indeed and LinkedIn...
After a few applications, I was contacted back. I had my first introductory interview, done with a fever and a tremendous amount of anxiety, but I wanted to present myself in the most genuine way possible without preparing anything beforehand. Subsequently, they presented me with a technical test where I had to fix a repository to pass all unit tests. After 2 uninterrupted days between the newly released ChatGPT giving me explanations of code pieces I didn't know and a thousand open tabs to find what I was missing for the solution, I managed to fix ALL the errors (it wasn't required) and in the end they chose me.
That's where I discovered for the first time what it really meant to work as a developer. I learned to use Jira to manage tasks, to work in a team, and to interact with project managers and team leaders. I found myself facing situations I never imagined I'd have to deal with, like when we had to optimize parts of the backend or fix issues on the Frontend in the company's internal CRM.
In March 2023, I took the big step of opening my VAT number. It was interesting to see how this change affected the way companies related to me - from a "simple employee" to a professional. It allowed me to better manage work and earnings, and especially to have more control over my time and professional choices.
The Present and Future
2024 has been a particular year. I've noticed a lot of changes in the tech sector: fewer and fewer job postings, the mass arrival of AI in recruiting (which hasn't helped at all), and the absurd phenomenon of ghosting in applications. The post-covid situation has created a chain effect: global layoffs have thrown a lot of senior developers into the market, further saturating an already crisis-hit market. It's become especially tough for junior and mid-level developers, who find themselves competing in a really complicated situation.
However, during this period I haven't been idle: besides redesigning the site, between September and October 2024, I created a fullstack task manager as a testing ground for modern technologies. I used TanStack Query for real-time synchronization, Router for type-safe navigation, and an Express.js backend with SQLite. From October to January 2025, I worked on completely rebuilding my personal site, the one where you're reading this article. It was a huge upgrade compared to the first version: I switched to NextJS 15, created a much richer home with vertical sections for skills, posts, and contacts, and completely redesigned the post cards adding tags. I moved everything to Supabase to centralize database and file management, implemented multilingual support with i18n, and configured Incremental Static Regeneration to optimize performance. I haven't implemented a CMS yet, but that's the next step.
Despite all the market difficulties, my passion for technology has remained the same as always - whether it's gaming, hardware, or web development. It's crazy to think how all these passions continue to intertwine in my work, just like when I was a kid modifying games or building PCs.
Looking back at the whole journey, from when I was a curious child in front of the PC until today, I realize that every single experience, even those that seemed to have nothing to do with web development, has contributed to making me the developer I am. And as the tech world continues to evolve, I can't wait to discover where the next chapter of this story will take me.
If you're reading this post and find yourself in the situation I was in during COVID, locked at home without a clear direction, I want to tell you that it's never too late to start over. My story shows that even the most winding paths can lead to something beautiful - the important thing is to never stop being curious and putting yourself out there. If you have that spark inside, that desire to understand how things work and create something of your own, then you already have the most important ingredient to start this journey. The market may be in crisis, but technology will always continue to evolve, and there will always be a need for passionate people who want to learn and grow in this sector.