A bit about me.

I was fifteen when I started running Minecraft servers. I wanted to build places people would log in to and not want to leave, and that has basically never stopped being the point. What changed is how much of it I touch now. I design it, I build the backend it runs on, I worry about whether anyone will show up to play, and lately I coach the developers doing the same work.

The engineering goes back a long way. I founded MineAlpha, a gaming portal that grew to thousands of active players, and I built it myself, from the Node.js backend down to the Discord bots and the deploy pipeline. Before that were years of plugins and servers that fell over at 2am if you got something wrong. That’s where I learned the rule I still trust: nobody cares how clever the experience is if the thing keeps crashing. That instinct carries well beyond games now: I build and run backends and distributed systems, and handle cybersecurity, for small and medium businesses too.

At Shapescape I now lead the development work on learning experiences in Minecraft. The job is mostly translation, turning a teaching goal into something that plays like a game and not like homework, and keeping the engineers and the education people pointed at the same thing. I did a version of this for years at Maker Camp too, designing maps and mechanics and shipping them onto Marketplace for players around the world. More and more, the work of leading and aligning people is the job itself, so I take on management and consulting in their own right, not only the building.

For a long stretch I also taught coding, robotics, and a bit of VR to kids of every age all over Italy. Explaining a hard idea to a ten year old is the fastest way to find out whether you understand it yourself. And because building something good is wasted if you can’t sell it, I went back and finished a Master’s in Digital Marketing. Design, code, marketing, teaching: they look like four different jobs, but to me they’ve always been the same one, making things people want to use.

Kids are playing anyway. Why not teach them something while they play?

From an interview with Enter, Loading, June 2026