Hey there! My name’s paolino (or at least, it’s close enough). I am your host here on the np-salesman.net site: the place where I blabber about technology, software, science, politics,  economics and whatever else.

So, whoami?

I’m Paolo Gianrossi, but many  just call me paolino. Italian by birth, geek by vocation. I started programming when I was ten on the trusty old Commodore 64, while growing up in Genova, allegedly the hometown of Christopher Columbus.

My family moved twice to the US (California, to be precise) when I was seven and then when I was fourteen, totalling a couple of years on the west coast. I attended school there and became proficient in English.

I received a Master Degree in Computer Science at University of Genoa after spending one year as a guest student at Humboldt Universität zu Berlin. I worked for some time as assistant researcher at my home university, working mostly on peer-to-peer distributed systems, distributed file systems and anonymous networks.

I worked as software engineer and then technical lead in international research programs (e.g. European Union’s FP6) and in industrial process automation.

I currently work as Technical Team Leader for Systems at Jobrapido, Europe’s number one jobsearch engine.

Fair enough. So what about np-salesman?

This site, once upon a time, wasn’t this site. Let me explain.

My first web presence dates back to the latest years of the last century. It was a static html page with a pale yellow background and some info about me. Then I had for a while a personal page on the servers of HU-Berlin, while I was a student there. When I got back to Italy in the first 2000s, I got (out of rebellion, futurism and self-condescension) my first personal website with a domain: yersinia.org.

At a point, I got a weblog on blogger. However, soon enough I moved it to this very domain.

The blog had highs and lows. It was in italian. It was usually fun, sometimes maddening.

Anyway, the site is now in this incarnation: a place about me and what I do and what I think and think about. In the fluidity of contemporary information, I try to keep everything I deem worth here inside.

But there’s a method to my madness…

There are basically four major kinds of information I care about writing:

•  Stuff I do: this has mostly to do with two subjects (right now): software/Computer Science/technology and management
• Stuff I think: this is about whatever rant comes to my mind and out of my fingers. Includes politics, economics, personal uncategorized thoughts, and more. This section might be in various languages (such as Italian, German, Spanish, and English of course)
• Stuff I like: science, cooking, teaching and coaching, life hacking experiments, music, foreign languages, fun stuff in general

I try to keep them somewhat separated, mostly because I know people who might care about software but not much about my thoughts on the italian economic reform, or how I exercise or whatever and viceversa. In case you missed it, there is a nice spiffy menu up there you can use to navigate to the appropriate section (plus other places).