My Story
1994: a 1200-page book, a calculator.
2025: mission-critical systems for national institutions.
32 years of continuous learning, no university, only official documentation and practice.
The Journey
1994: The Beginning
At 18 I discovered programming. A 1200-page book, intensive study, and my first application: a calculator. Simple, but it worked. From that moment I never stopped learning.
The Self-Taught Path
No bootcamp. No university. Just passion, official documentation and thousands of hours of practice. I learned by reading technical manuals, experimenting, failing and fixing. Always hands-on.
Today: Full-Stack Architect
I work on mission-critical systems for national banking institutions, IT multinationals and high-impact enterprise infrastructure. I run production microservices, multi-platform enterprise databases and Kubernetes clusters.
My colleagues call me "The Computing Wikipedia."
The Diploma? It Came Later
In 2016, for bureaucratic reasons, I earned my diploma. But the truth? It wasn't the piece of paper that got me here. It was passion. Curiosity. The drive to never stop learning.
Today
50 years old, 32 years of hands-on experience. Angular, Spring Boot, Kubernetes, OpenShift. From the '94 calculator to national banking systems. Fully self-taught.
Professional Timeline
Software house (services/fintech) — Voice AI for back-office automation
Voice AI answering calls, booking appointments and managing calendars (Python/FastAPI, PyTorch, Whisper, Coqui, Twilio). 3-GPU cluster over 3 servers + K3s.
Personal projects & Homelab
antonionarra.io (Astro + PocketBase), self-hosted homelab (Traefik, Umami, Infisical, n8n, Vikunja, Gitea) and local LLMs (llama.cpp, Ollama, Unsloth).
IT consultancy (banking) — Credit Risk Register
Microservices connecting institutions to the national central bank (JEE, Spring Boot 2.7→3, Apache Spark, Liquibase, API First, Angular 20). Batch on Oracle/Postgres/SQL Server.
Software house — Company server infrastructure
6 Linux servers for dev/test/prod (Ubuntu, Docker, hardening: Fail2ban, ufw, SSH/RSA keys).
Italian banking group — Debt recovery (Workout & Restructuring)
Web platform for debt recovery: profiles, cases, reports, legal handling (JEE, Struts "XFRAME", DB2, Angular, Bootstrap).
Software house — Cross-platform mobile app
Cross-platform app (Android/iOS/Windows Phone) with Xamarin Forms and C#.
Automotive group — .NET web applications
Web apps (.NET 3.5, ASP.NET, Silverlight, WCF, DevExpress/Telerik) and the "ExcelLayer" framework.
National telecommunications operator — Telematics infrastructure
User profiles, pricing, billing, SIM/telephony (JEE, Struts, Oracle 9i).
E-invoicing startup — E-invoicing & legal archiving
E-invoicing and EU-compliant archiving; multi-protocol delivery (email/SMS/PEC), iPhone/iPad client (VB.NET, .NET 3.5/4.0, MySQL).
Telecommunications operator — Oracle DBA & System Engineer
Install, maintenance, backup/recovery of DBs (Linux/Unix, Oracle 8i/9i/10g).
Publishing group — Publishing e-procurement
ICT infrastructure for publishing trading (orders/invoices) on SAP NetWeaver (J2EE, EJB, SAP Web Dynpro).
Italian banking group — Cost Management
Web app for group maintenance-contract control (J2EE, BEA WebLogic, Oracle 9i, Hibernate, Struts, JUnit).
E-invoicing startup — Online invoice management
Analyst/developer/team leader: electronic invoice management and archiving (VB.NET, SQL Server, IIS, .NET).
Italian banking group — HW/SW contracts intranet
Intranet for HW/SW maintenance contracts and dev/test/prod environments (VB.NET, ASP.NET, Oracle 8i/9i).
Italian banking group — DataMart & ETL
ETL on two Oracle DataMarts (Unix shell + stored procedures); Tomcat/JSP input, Business Objects reporting. Also DBA.
Insurance company — Help Desk
Developer & DBA: Help Desk for support requests (ASP, Oracle 8i); analysis and tablespace maintenance.
Directory publisher — VBA macros for space costing
Flow conversion via Excel VBA macros to compute page ad-space costs; initial build and maintenance. (First professional experience.)
The Beginning (self-taught)
A 1200-page technical book, first application (a calculator). Start of the self-taught journey: no university, only official documentation. Highlight: C++.
My Hardware
Do You Need €10,000 to Get Serious?
Some run AI on €10,000 workstations with €12,000 GPUs. I run it on a €500 Acer laptop. CPU only.
Does it take longer? Yes. Do I get the same result? Also yes. Because it's not the wallet that makes the difference — it's knowing what you're doing, and not giving up.
My home server has been sweating at 91°C for days. And it doesn't quit. A bit like me.
Acer Aspire A515-57
serverLLM inference node, CPU-only
i7-12650H, 64GB RAM, 1TB NVMe. Runs continuous inference at 93°C. It was gathering dust on my desk.
500 €HP ProDesk 600 G3
serverHome NAS and media server
i5-7500T, 32GB RAM, 5.5TB RAID5. Cool and quiet: 45°C, always on.
150 €Supermicro Super Server - Home-Lab
serverHeart of the self-hosted services
Xeon E5-1650 v4, 128GB RAM, 2x NVMe RAID1. 20+ self-hosted services (Git, CI, databases, automations, storage, SSO…). Only ports 22, 80 and 443 face the internet: no database is reachable from outside. Every web service sits behind authentication (Keycloak SSO or its own login), internal access goes through my private headscale VPN, SSH is key-only with fail2ban. Privacy and security first.
23 €/meseCoordinatore VPN (headscale)
serverCoordinator of my private network
OVH VPS, 2 vCPU, 4GB RAM. Self-hosted headscale: all my machines talk over my own private network, with no third-party service in between.
4 €/meseNodo Monitorin
serverInfrastructure monitoring and alerting
OVH VPS, 2 vCPU, 4GB RAM. n8n drives alert emails and monitoring across the whole infrastructure, with uptime-kuma tracking service uptime.
4 €/meseServer di Produzione
serverClient applications in production
Xeon D-1540 (8c/16t), 64GB RAM, 4× 2TB disks in dual RAID1 for maximum data safety. Docker + traefik serve the clients' web applications. Key-only SSH access, fail2ban and firewall; private VPN coming soon.
34 €/meseMacBook Pro M4 Max 16"
macMain development workstation (company laptop, on lease)
Apple M4 Max, 128GB unified memory, 1TB SSD + External SSD 2TB on TB4 port. It's the 16" because it carries the top, full-power M4 Max — available only on the 16" (the 14" takes only the cut-down version). The beast of the fleet.
0 €MacBook Air M4 15"
macMobility laptop
Apple M4, 16GB RAM, 256GB SSD + External SSD 2TB on TB4 port. Light, to work anywhere.
60 €/mese🔒 All my servers are set up the same way: key-only SSH, fail2ban, and ufw with just three open ports (22, 80, 443). I build the new ones the same way too.
Technical Skills
Linguaggi
Frontend
Backend & Framework
Database
Infrastruttura & DevOps
Virtualizzazione
CI/CD & Versioning
AI & ML
Cloud & Telefonia
Application & Web Server
ERP & Business Intelligence
Mobile
Self-hosting Home-lab
IDE & Tools
My Philosophy
Official Documentation
Always the primary source. Blogs and tutorials help, but official docs are the truth.
Experimentation
Break things, fail, learn, fix. There's no better learning than hands-on practice.
Admitting Mistakes
"I was wrong" is not weakness, it's strength. Fixing it right away is professionalism.
Continuous Learning
32 years and I've never stopped. Technology evolves, I evolve with it.
Want to Know More?
Explore my courses or get in touch.