I was born in this small town in Sicily with 4,000 people. My mom is from Tuscany and my dad from Sicily.
I grew up being an outsider because of my weird accent. I was bullied and beaten on a daily base in school, by some of those fucktards. Life is ironic, those fucktards are my friends.
Being bullied is probably one of the worst best things that can happen to anyone, it either makes you a psycho, or it makes you a frustrated introspective person, creating an insatiable and irrational hunger for ambition because you’re constantly trying to prove that you belong. Elon is on the same boat. That’s actually how most of us get into Tony Robbins and start to believe in those new age bullshits, such as meditation and the Law Of Attraction. I'm going to dedicate a serious post to that sometimes.
I started coding back in 1999 while creating my Warcraft 3 clan website. I worked on it so hard that it became one of the biggest warcraft 3 portal and it hosted the Italian national team. I created my own CMS because I was too lazy to study the horrible documentation of the shitty PHPNuke. I was a nerd, back when nerds were disguised as losers and socially uncool people. I don’t know at which point saying “I got this, I’m an arcade engineer” become something cool to brag about, but I saw someone in Jersey approaching a woman in difficulty with her car not starting.
When I was around 18 years old, I was in love with a friend, who eventually broke my heart, and make me go into an emo spiral, becoming a goth dressed like The Crow... in a beach town where nobody knows what emos or vegetarians are. I then moved from metal, into nu-metal and eventually into hip hop and break dance.
Around 23 I moved to Milan, where I started to work in tech startups. During that time nothing interesting happened, aside from moving to Cardiff and (almost) getting arrested in Croatia, ah love again… yep, I know, there’s a pattern there. During summer my boss told me: “Fed take a vacation we'll need you back in September”. So I packed my backpack and on July 15, 2008, I traveled to New York and flipped to a totally new page of my life, filled with serendipity and crazier events.
Notes:
1. I'll write part 2 at some point.
2. The purpose of my 30 articles in 30 days challenge is to improve my writing skills while having fun and to possibly pay my meal.
Federico Ulfo
Creative software engineer into Bitcoin, acting, dancing, wine, coffee...
https://twitter.com/feulf
https://linkedin.com/in/federicoulfo