After nearly ten years of false starts, I finally built a personal website that feels like mine.
Every previous attempt began with an existing template. I had ideas about what I wanted, but never quite had the design and front-end skills to build them myself. The result was always somebody else’s structure with my information placed inside it. It worked, but it did not feel like something I had made.
This time, AI helped me turn an idea in my head into something I could build. Rather than adapting another template, I could start with a concept built around two of my passions: distributed systems and design.
Behind the design
I wanted a website that brought thoughtful design together with my experience building distributed systems—something distinctly technical, but still refined.
I think of this website as a piece of art. Art does not have to follow a fixed set of rules; it can simply express what its creator thinks and feels while making it. This website is that for me. It does not aim to follow every best practice. It aims to feel the way I want it to feel. The ASCII characters, monochrome palette, typography, and small interactions all follow that direction.
At the center of the website are clouds of ASCII characters, with bits moving back and forth between them. My idea was to picture a distributed system made up of individual components that communicate with one another. I wanted the clouds to move in a way that feels almost alive, suggesting how the many parts of a complex system can come together like a living organism.
How things work and how they feel
Since I was little, I have been interested in both how technology works and how it feels. I love building complex, reliable systems that solve problems at scale. I am equally interested in how we shape technology—from physical objects to digital products—so that people can understand and enjoy using it.
I tend to surround myself with things that feel good to use. That feeling can come from the click of a button, the speed of an interaction, the materials, the colors, or even the history behind an object. Something can be imperfect and still be special when there is intention behind that imperfection. What matters to me is being able to feel that somebody cared while making it.
I first understood this clearly when I discovered Apple, and especially the MacBook Air. Until then, computers had been mostly functional objects to me. The MacBook Air showed me that technology could do more than solve a problem: it could bring joy through its form, materials, interactions, and all the small details that made it feel considered. It was around that time that I started thinking I wanted to use technology to create something beautiful.
I have never worked as a designer, and I am by no means one myself. But I have had the opportunity to build products with excellent designers, and working with them gradually sharpened my sense of what thoughtful design can be. I became interested not in owning the flashiest thing, but in using things made by people who clearly cared.
I try to put the same care into the things I build, hoping that somebody else might notice it too. There is something inherently human about leaving evidence of that care in our work. In its own small way, this website is an expression of that: something I wanted to build and leave on the internet for myself.
A place to write
This website is also a place for me to write. I do not have an editorial calendar or a carefully planned theme. I simply want a space of my own where I can put ideas into words.
Creating things has been central to my interests for a long time. When I got my first Mac, I started making YouTube videos. Later, I experimented with icon packs, mobile apps, and websites. My work gradually became more technical, leading me into back-end engineering and eventually distributed systems. But the desire to design, explain, and create never disappeared.
Teaching has been another constant. I made hundreds of videos for my YouTube channel, I am Riccardo, although many are hidden now because they covered a fairly random collection of subjects. At university, I also loved teaching my classmates.
Teaching exposes the gaps in what I think I understand. Seeing how another person interprets an explanation tells me whether I understand something clearly enough to communicate it. Their questions then make me examine it again, often improving my own understanding in the process.
A few years ago, I started Productivus, a newsletter about the productivity tools and workflows I was using. I wrote dozens of articles and found readers willing to pay for them. The newsletter is paused now, but the experience confirmed how much I enjoy writing and sharing what I have learned with others.
That is what I want this website to make possible again: writing when I feel like writing, without a schedule or the need to limit myself to one subject.
For now, it is simply my corner of the internet: technical or personal, funny or serious—whatever the idea requires.