I've worked with various companies (Truelite, Eurotech HPC) both as an employee and as a consultant in various activities spanning from system and network administration to software development.
Since 2007 I'm the IT Manager of the Istituto di Genomica Applicata, where I've built the HPC computing cluster, the storage, backup and network systems. Around two years ago I started to build a web interface to start tracking the biological samples which were being processed and sequenced in the lab, in order to automate some analysis tasks. Some time after, I introduced to Python and Django my colleague Vittorio Zamboni and he quickly caught up with the new technologies (he came from the php world) and soon began to work autonomously.
