About

I'm Mark — Italian, based outside Italy, and I've been building things in IT and apps for more than twenty years. Web and mobile, frontend and backend, and for a long stretch now the parts nobody sees: servers, protocols, and the architecture underneath.

What I actually do

These days most of my work sits in two places. The first is multiplayer and real-time systems — mainly backend. Sockets, wire protocols, state synchronisation, the unglamorous problem of keeping a few thousand clients agreeing on the same thing at the same time. The second is AWS: architecture, and specifically cost optimization, which in my experience is where most companies are quietly losing the most money for the least reason.

Over the last ten years the job has increasingly become project management and technical advisory — deciding what to build, what not to build, and which technical debt is worth taking on. I still write code. I'm just as often the person telling someone else that they don't need to.

How I work

Direct. I'd rather tell you a plan won't work in the first meeting than in the fourth month. Most technical disasters I've watched up close weren't caused by hard problems — they were caused by nobody wanting to say something inconvenient early enough.

I also care a great deal about privacy, mine and other people's, and it shows in how I build. This site is a small example: no tracking cookies, no analytics profiling you, no third-party scripts watching what you type. Every tool here runs entirely in your browser — you can go offline and they still work.

About projects

I won't list them. Almost everything I've worked on belongs to companies that expect discretion, and I'd rather be the consultant who doesn't talk about clients than the one with an impressive portfolio page. If you want to know whether I've solved a problem like yours, ask me directly — I can usually say a lot in a conversation that I can't put on a public page.

Work with me

I'm open to consulting and collaborations. The problems I'm most useful on: real-time and multiplayer backends, AWS bills that grew without anyone deciding they should, architecture reviews before a rewrite, and second opinions on technical decisions that are hard to reverse.

Send me a message — tell me what you're dealing with and I'll tell you honestly whether I'm the right person for it.