Sardinia stands as a fortress of silence, a rock anchored deep within the Mediterranean, guarded by the wind and the watchful eyes of three thousand years of stacked stones. It is a land where time moves at the speed of eroding granite.
Here, along the north-western shores, on April 17, 1974, just before dawn, a signal pierced the static.
The world he enters is heavy with analog friction. It is a reality defined by the slow, clicking turn of rotary dials, by ink drying on paper, and by distances that can only be crossed with ships and patience. But he is a glitch in this timeline. He is a child of the limestone, yet his mind is already tuning into a frequency that does not yet exist. He understands early that while sharing a physical object divides it, sharing knowledge multiplies it—the heartbeat of the open source ethos he will one day champion. He is the operator of a terminal that has not yet been plugged in. Before the first modem screeches its chaotic handshake across the copper wires, before the web spins its invisible silk over the planet, he is already there, waiting. He is the signal, waking up in the static of a century about to turn.
The hum begins for him in the mid-1980s with a Commodore 64. For this ten-year-old, its language of blinking prompts is a revelation of pure logic. Through the late 80s and early 90s, he attends humanistic studies in Sassari, immersing himself in the roots of modern thought, Latin, Greek, Philosophy, History. During this era, an Amiga 500 becomes a true portal. He finds his first tribe not in a football pitch, but in local hacking groups focused on the gritty, joyous work of cracking games, sharing floppies, and exploring the absolute limits of their machines. It is a world of copied disks and shared knowledge, a digital agora built on pirated software and collective curiosity.
He devours the entire Foundation series by Isaac Asimov and several other formative science fiction books, absorbing the concept of preserving knowledge against the collapse of empires. Simultaneously, a different rhythm takes root. He picks up a bass guitar and joins a local punk group, the Lost Boys. They are deeply inspired by the raw Sardinian voice of the punk rock band Kenze Neke. The lesson is imprinted deep: culture and technology are both tools for carving out space for voices the world ignores.
In the autumn of 1993, he moves to Pisa to study Electronic Engineering. The lecture halls cannot hold him; his true magnet is the university datacenter, a sanctum of humming terminals where he focuses his energy for the academic year.
Here, the world unfurls. In November 1993, he reaches through a gateway called the Tallahassee Free-Net (TFN) in distant Florida to claim his first email address and Unix account—an early gateway to the global network. He navigates Gopherspace from a terminal in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and witnesses the graphical web for the first time through the Mosaic browser. He frequents the vast ISCA BBS from Iowa, the largest student BBS of the era. There, he meets Walter, a Dutch student from Rotterdam University, who invites him to a new digital space being built, a first in Europe: the Brinta BBS.
On Brinta, he does not just visit. He builds a homeland. After creating an Italian Room, he founds the Sardinian Room. This is historically the first dedicated digital space for conversing in Sardinian on the internet. He types the foundational words, a digital manifesto in Limba, likely the first words ever written in the language online:
"Bene enidu omine Sardu. Custa est sa sola area de Internet in ue est contzessu de faeddare in Limba. Calesisiat s'importante est chi siat Limba! Si est beru chi sa rivolutzione inscomenzat dae sa limba, inoghe semus totus revolutzionarios. Viva sa Sardigna libera e birde. A nos bidere!"
It is a declaration of a Temporary Autonomous Zone: If it is true that the revolution begins with language, here we are all revolutionaries. During this time in Pisa, he discovers Hakim Bey, while William Gibson becomes another formative influence. Their concepts—the TAZ and cyberpunk, respectively—become guiding stars for his future projects. But he is not alone in the datacenter's glow. With friends Alessio, Andrea, and Giorgio, he inhabits the network, exploring the internet's expanding edges and discovering Linux together. Adopting the Slackware distribution, they become pioneers, building a new world one compile at a time.
By the summer of 1994, he returns to Sardinia. He switches his academic focus to Law, building on his secondary school background, but his real work is architectural. With his friend Francesco, he builds a monument: the Nuraghe BBS.
The hardware is an old Amiga 500. The software, a modified version of Citadel. The logistics are a stroke of guerrilla genius: to ensure 24/7 uptime without blocking his family's home telephone, they install the node in an uninhabited family country house where the phone line sits perpetually free for incoming modem connections. The same house where the band plays punk music almost every night, sometimes thrashing along to the screeching rhythm of the modem handshake.
In the quiet of the winter of 1994, by the glow of the CRT, he begins to build a nation of bytes. He completes the first full digital transcription of the Carta de Logu, the medieval legal code of Judge Eleonora d'Arborea. This act of radical preservation makes the text globally accessible and is later cited in academic works on Sardinian linguistics. He transcribes the poetry of Montanaru, inspired by Project Gutenberg and Liber Liber, and publishes a short grammar of the Sardinian language based on his own studies. Identity, he proves, can be uploaded.
Between 1995 and 1997, he lives the life of a digital nomad before the term exists. He moves to London, working in Italian restaurants. His sanctuary is the Cyberia Cafe, likely the world's first internet café. He becomes an ethnographer of the digital dawn, watching the public's first fumbling, wondrous interactions with the web.
Later, he moves to Bielefeld, Germany, with his band. Working as a waiter at the Venere Restaurant, he convinces the owner, Nunzio, to install the area's very first Internet Corner. But access isn't enough; he wants control. He engineers an early prototype of the Internet of Things (IoT). Using a spare 286 laptop, a relay card from Conrad connected to the electrical panel, and a 2400 baud modem, he creates a system to switch the restaurant's interior and exterior lights and pizza ovens on and off remotely via phone ring tones and schedulers.
Back in London by the summer of 1997, he and Giuliano set up a short-lived VMS (Voice BBS), experimenting with every form of connection available.
From late 1997 through the turn of the millennium, his journey turns pivotal. He joins Netgate Internet Point in Florence, founded by Giovanni and Patrizia. He internationalizes their systems to handle tourists and teaches internet skills to daily customers.
Recognized for his skill, he is sent to Rome to open and direct the flagship location near the Pantheon. He oversees a massive network of fifty computers and begins coding web applications directly on the live internet.
He soon starts working for VEB, the European Academy founded by Peter and Andreas in Florence. He serves as Sysadmin and Developer, building their entire IT infrastructure from the ground up. A project for VEB, Brianet, takes him to Barcelona's El Raval in the spring. Working from a ground-floor hub fueled by an early high-speed Telefonica line, he teaches coding to children from the developing neighborhood. He builds one of his first video streaming systems to broadcast interviews to partners across Europe. He maintains the VEB infrastructure remotely for fourteen years, pioneering remote work long before it became the norm.
He returns to Sardinia briefly in May 2001 to pull off a magic trick. With Francesco, Alessio, and Giovanni, he orchestrates one of the earliest live streams of its kind: broadcasting the Cavalcata Sarda to the internet, proving that local tradition could have global reach.
Through the early 2000s, he becomes a citizen of nowhere and everywhere. He moves to Graz, Austria, opening an Internet Corner at the Sul Café owned by Jorg, who becomes his primary business partner for the next decade. Now he studies linguistics at the Institut für Romanistik but spends most of his time at the Technische Universität datacenter.
Later, he is in Tenerife, where he meets Mike. He releases his first significant open-source project, netpoint, on SourceForge to manage the local internet point.
In May 2003, he plants his flag: eja.it. Eja—Sardinian for "Yes." It is his digital identity, his ethos of affirmation.
He relocates to Vienna and co-founds GreenBanana GmbH with Jorg, designing Trade Master, a sophisticated LAMP solution for finance brokers. He releases Tibula, a framework for metadata-driven data modeling, and co-founds Voxgate GmbH with Jorg, Isaac, and Arseen. Here, he pioneers software that turns ordinary mobile phones into GSM gateways via Bluetooth to reduce costs. The software is named Miax. On November 30, 2005, he commits Miax packages to OpenWrt. His code enters the bloodstream of the global network.
Parallel to this, spanning five years, he serves the Vatican. Working with the Ordo Clericorum Ministrantium Infirmis, he digitizes Latin biographies. He builds a custom OCR pipeline for the Museo Centrale del Risorgimento, extracting text from over 300,000 pages to create a high-performance search engine for historians.
The ventures grow in scale and complexity. Again in Vienna he co-founds Call2World with Jorg and Wolfgang, architecting a VoIP platform on Asterisk that swells to carry millions of minutes per month. But this traffic is simply longing finding its way home. From the heart of the old austrian empire, the platform becomes a lifeline for immigrant communities, allowing the displaced to dissolve the distance to the families they left behind. Yet, amidst the startups, a steady hand is required. Following Peter from his VEB days, he begins a long tenure as Strategic Advisor for TÜV Thüringen Italia in Parma, a role of quiet guardianship over security protocols that he holds to this day.
The pull of the island remains, but the connection broadens. In 2011, he returns to Tenerife to partner with Mike at Direct Telecom. He leads the design of the DT Media IPTV platform. Here, the code serves a community of expats in Spain, ensuring that the screen in a foreign living room can still tune into the comforting frequency of home. Simultaneously, he looks back to Sardinia. With Davide, he co-founds Wifi TV. It is a brilliant inversion of the internet: broadcasting DVB channels over offline WiFi networks. The system is deployed in the concrete bellies of Bologna and Venice airports, and across all Sardinian airports, ports, and ferries for nearly a decade.
But his heart lives in synthesis. On November 24, 2013, he launches eja.tv. Its slogan is remix the narrative. It aggregates thousands of live IPTV channels in more than a hundred languages from almost every country around the world, allowing users to watch global television from just a browser. It acts as a dual gateway: a telescope for the curious to explore foreign cultures, and a mirror for the displaced to see their own reflections. Shortly after, he releases eja, a micro web server and Lua toolkit.
He achieves a quiet milestone on April 21, 2016, becoming an official Contributor to Debian. That same year, his company Zapelin, co-founded with Mike and Shahid, wins the Premio Emprendedor XXI. Their invention, the Zapelin Box, allows modern HD IPTV to flow through old hotel coaxial cables by simulating the DVB signal of a standard broadcasting tower.
As the decade turns, his work deepens, focusing on privacy, access, and guardianship. Spanning from 2017 to 2021, he co-founds Eja Watch Srl with Davide and Giacomo. He architects the cloud infrastructure for an AI-powered smartwatch for children, earning a Google Assistant award for the voice integration.
He releases Cronotopia, a cartographic marvel that maps offline Wikidata spatio-temporal layers over OpenStreetMap tiles from a single SQLite database. In April 2021, he contributes to the core of FFmpeg, implementing support for the Network Information Table (NIT). Around this time, he also explores the edges of audio intelligence, releasing wav2vad for voice activity detection.
On November 14, 2021, he releases Surf Browser. It is an immersive, full-screen tool supporting DoH and native SOCKS4/5 tunneling.
Between 2022 and 2023, he works for Veed Ltd in London. He architects backend infrastructure for live streaming and applies prompt engineering to create intelligent, automated video editing features.
The years spanning 2024 to early 2025 mark a shift from building infrastructure to reclaiming sovereignty. He realizes that the device in the pocket has evolved from a tool into a spy, so he begins the work of dismantling and rebuilding the user experience from the inside out.
In May 2024, he initiates a quiet revolt against the attention economy. He constructs a digital shield comprising Ntfy Relay, which reclaims ownership over notifications, and the TTS Server. The idea behind the latter is a reclamation of privacy and efficiency: in place of using a paid cloud service that harvests user data, the server utilizes the local voice generation engine embedded in every Android phone. To govern this new silence, he codes Launcher, a tracking-free home screen designed for utility rather than engagement. These tools, alongside his Surf browser, are also published on Google Play, placing privacy-first infrastructure directly into the hands of the public.
By June, he bridges the oldest digital communication methods with the newest. He releases PBX, a VoIP integration suite. It is a fusion of the immediacy of modern chat apps with the intelligence of AI, built upon the enduring architecture of his Tibula framework—code written decades ago finding new breath in the age of artificial intelligence.
As 2024 fades into 2025, his focus turns to the permanence of knowledge. He foresees a world where connection is intermittent, but wisdom must remain constant. In December, he releases Wikilite. It is more than an app; it is a survival tool for information—an offline Wikipedia reader featuring dual-search capabilities with Lexical FTS5 and Semantic MRL embeddings. It allows the entirety of human history to sit, accessible and searchable, without a signal.
The momentum carries him into the spring of 2025. He refines the invisible plumbing of the web, releasing the Voice Server for macOS. Like its Android counterpart, it manages both voice recognition and synthesis on the device itself. It allows the internet to speak with a native tongue without relying on cloud services, ensuring that voice data remains private and the user is free from subscription fees.
This philosophy of accessible knowledge leaves the screen and enters the physical world in May 2025. He travels to Cairo, advising the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit on digital learning transformation. There, near the ancient libraries of the desert, he applies a lifetime of digital philosophy to the tangible imperative of education.
The latter half of 2025 and the dawn of 2026 represent a return to his ideological roots: the Temporary Autonomous Zone. The roadmap is clear, and the code is already forming in the dark.
In June 2025, the vision manifests as TAZ. It is a direct callback to Hakim Bey and his student days in Pisa, but evolved. It is a portable, local-network file manager and BBS that discovers peers via Bluetooth radio waves—a digital campfire that leaves no ash.
As the year turns, he rethinks the very act of input. He releases Keyboard, a privacy-first tool with zero internet permissions, engineered specifically for writing software on mobile screens. By the dawn of 2026, the rhythm becomes a drumbeat. He does not stop. He releases Procmaillm to tame the chaos of the inbox with local intelligence, alongside Tabulita and Maps—zero-dependency servers for data and geography. These are the tools of a digital survivalist: compact, efficient, and reliant on nothing but themselves.
He sits, perhaps in Tenerife, or Cairo, or the silent Sardinian country house where the Nuraghe BBS once hummed. He is the boy at the Commodore, the punk on stage, the hacker in the datacenter, the archivist in the Vatican, the engineer wiring the pizza oven. He never chose between Sardinia and the world. He built a Sardinian room in the world. He built, sold, and then set the code free.
He has always recognized the flaw in the economy of things: in the exchange of coins, one relinquishes what they give. But the exchange of ideas follows a different physics; when knowledge is shared, no one is depleted, and both are enriched. His life is a proof-of-concept. Identity is not diluted by connection, but amplified. Whether connecting immigrants in Vienna to voices in remote villages, or beaming a home broadcast to a traveler in Spain, the goal is to shrink the silence between people. Technology, stripped of empire, is a tool for preservation, for voice, for community. A Temporary Autonomous Zone can be built with lines of Lua, a soldered relay, or a stubbornly typed sentence in an ancient tongue. From the basalt nuraghe to the silicon one, the purpose remains. To create a fortress of belonging, a beacon of signal in the static, and to leave the gate wide open.
Bene enidu.
Welcome.