A new path

I started with Wordpress.

In 2014 I knew nothing about anything.

Nothing about what a blog was (really), how to manage a team, how to keep a project going. Tweaknology was a beautiful experiment, I said it many times. And I told myself even more often. Now the collaboration with Italian Tech gives me the opportunity to talk to many different people, to give a voice to my ideas, but it is a newspaper.

It is so absurd to think that 7 years ago I was writing the first lines on a blog launched with 3 other colleagues in university, and now my signature is on La Repubblica and La Stampa. I write about what I like, it is the reason why my contents are asked for. I can say I have come a long way, and never settled.

In 2017, when I started working in Campus Party, I was very happy: I could amplify my work as a blogger even more, giving the opportunity to many experts from all over Italy and the world to tell their story. I started as Community Manager and became Global Content Manager. I spoke with Al Gore, Vint Cerf, Tim Berners-Lee, Edward Snowden, but also with very young people who have already made giant strides in technological progress. But I always missed something. The problem I felt was that I talked about all these things, or let others talk about what they had done. I, basically, had never talked about something of mine.

I believe this was what pushed me to found DoubleBit in 2018, together with Jacopo and Riccardo, companions of adventures also in Tweaknology, Campus Party and much more. Well, it didn’t go well. I tried, but I didn’t have enough experience. I had a lot of euphoria, that yes.

When I was offered to help plan the launch of Avascan as Community Manager I thought I would start slowly. After all, I would have done only the Community Manager. Basically, I was on Twitter answering dozens of people every day, with the goal of growing the fan base from 0 to 1000 users in a month. I did it, and within three months I reached over 2,000 users scattered between Twitter, Telegram and Discord. I managed all communication. Then however the work increased, because Avalanche - the network whose data Avascan shows - started to grow week after week. There were traffic peaks, every two or three weeks, in which I also had to help with feedback from the community, pass them on to the developers so they could improve the site. And then I could go back to being the Community Manager. But I was already enthusiastic anyway to work with very strong developers, who always knew how to translate even just ideas into software products.

At that moment I was working closer and closer to a software product, doing something of my own. But, specifically, I was helping to make something even better that wasn’t mine, through someone else’s feedback. In short, not exactly the best.

Then, over the months, Avalanche acquired more and more popularity and with the passing of time the situation changed drastically. I went from Community Manager to Product Manager managing activities for developers and creating specifications for new components starting from team ideas. And then I started having them, those ideas. I had an idea that will take us years to realize, and that alone I could never have had clear nor implement: the idea of developing an explorer, that is a site that shows the data of a blockchain, of a new generation. Strongly oriented to become a useful tool not only for professional traders and sector experts, but for the housewife of Voghera.

It is a very difficult undertaking, that of translating the data and contents of decentralized finance (DeFi) in simple and intuitive visualizations. But we will make it. The first step of this new path is the page Avalanche Market Cap: a process that lasted months, with dozens of iterations, to arrive at a representation that is still not complete, but which at least is better than the initial idea, very vague. The point is that making these new pages, representing these new data, is a totally new challenge: nobody does it like this. And so we have no one to take inspiration from, on the contrary: we only have to not take inspiration, that is to exclude.

And it is beautiful like this, it is exciting and motivating every day.

But we need not one, but many hands. We need very strong people who are ready to get involved not on an economic level (we don’t have particular budget problems), but on a work level: badass developers who know how to do everything autonomously, who are better than us. Here, in general I can say this: we are looking only for people who are better than us, because only in this way can they give added value. Obviously, good in their field. We are looking for people, not skills.

This thing drives me crazy, because finally I am working on a software product. I am working on something that has the potential to reach millions of people (today it reaches some hundreds of thousands), but with marginal efforts. We are expanding the team and we would like to do it at a speed 10 times higher than we do today, but it is difficult, for the points mentioned before.

And that is why from today I start again to do the job I did years ago, the blogger. I will tell our journey, here in Italian, and on the Avascan blog in English, hoping that many will recognize themselves, and decide to make this journey with us. It will be beautiful, really.

Our open positions are here, with others that will be added in the coming weeks: https://jobs.avascan.info/

Just send me an email to [email protected] with subject “Avascan Candidacy”.

Until the next story.