If you’d asked me at sixteen what I wanted to do with my life, I’d have said “a programmer”. In part that’s how it went, but the truth is that programming was never the point. What always pulled me in was understanding how things work, and software was simply the place where I could pop the hood and look inside without asking anyone’s permission.
I learned almost everything on the Internet. Not today’s Internet, the one made of social feeds, but the one of forums, of communities, of IRC chats, of nights spent arguing with people on the other side of the world I’d never meet in person. A place where you built your reputation slowly, and where learning mostly meant having the nerve to ask stupid questions in front of everyone. That’s where I started, and I owe it a lot.
In 2010 I was still a minor. Mirko and I wanted to work in software and, with the confidence you only have at that age, we decided to go out on our own. We had no idea what running a business actually meant, so we did the thing that felt most obvious: we registered a one-person VAT number and used it as two. We laugh about it now; back then it felt like a brilliant move. Words like margins, sustainability, business risk meant nothing to us; there was only the urge to build something. It ended more or less the way it had to, and it’s still one of the experiences that taught me the most.
In the years after I worked as an employee, for more than ten years. I saw companies from the inside: the processes, the clients, the projects that went well and the ones that hit the wall. That’s where I understood something I’d never have accepted at twenty, which is that writing software is only one part of the job. The hard decisions almost never involve the code. They involve people, timelines, trade-offs, and who takes responsibility when something goes wrong.
Then I went back to what I’d tried as a kid, with a lot more experience and quite a few fewer dogmas. Today I run two things that look like cousins but reason in opposite ways: one is a software house, building custom software for clients; the other is building a product of its own, influencer.camp. Put that way it sounds like the same job, but in practice it asks for two different heads, and jumping between them every day is half the effort and half the fun.
That’s why this isn’t an “about me”. I don’t want to teach you to program: the Internet is full of people far better than me at that. What I can tell you is how decisions change when software stops being just code and starts touching a product, a company, real people.
Four themes will come up here: software, product, entrepreneurship, and community. The part I care about most, though, is what happens where they meet: when a technical choice drags an entire business model along with it, or when a product decision ends up changing how a team works. After all these years I’m still convinced that the most interesting thing about software is the people who build it, far more than the technology itself.
I still don’t really know where this blog will end up, the same way I had no idea where that VAT number the two of us opened in 2010 would end up. The difference is that this time I feel like telling it as it happens. If you’re up for it, stick around. 👋
— Pietro · 2026 / 08 / 04