I’m Marco Cecconi. I live in Trento, Italy with my wife Michela and my son Yuri where I work from my bat-cave. I fell in love with programming on a ZX Spectrum 48K in the 80’s, where I wrote games because I could not afford to have all I wanted. I then fell in love with the PC, with modems and BBSs and low level programming -- I still have some demos and a copy of SoftICE somewhere, along with some really early Slackware.

I consider myself a developer with both wide and deep interests in the craft. I am particularly intrigued by trying to understand what it takes to build large-scale server applications and how to merge my interest for low level stuff with my interest for large systems.

• In 1998 I worked for a first-gen internet start up in Milan and we IPO’d. Whilst I made exactly zero money with my stock options, the company greatly expanded and I was able to move to Paris first and Lisbon later to help build or support the development teams in those countries.
• In 2009 I moved to the UK, finally happy to find a place where the work is interesting and I actually speak the local language.
• In 2013 I started working for the core team at Stack Overflow.
• In 2017 I became an Engineering Manager at Toptal, where I am helped build the largest remote company in the world.
• In 2023 I became the Chief R&D Officer at BaxEnergy, where I make a difference building software to manage hundreds of gigawatts of renewable energy worldwide.

I write about software development, coding, architecture and team leadership. I also speak at conferences worldwide.

The views expressed on this blog are my own and not my employer’s, ‘mkay?

And Sklivvz stands for …?

It’s meant to be unpronounceable. Back in the day, playing Ultima, I thought it would be funny to have all the NPCs have speech bubbles with an unpronounceable word in them.

A lot of people had a handle at the start up I worked for, so the nick stuck and I’ve been using it ever since. People pronounce it sklees, skleeoos or sklywiz. I sincerely try to avoid the matter, but then I think about the speech bubbles and decide to keep using it for a little longer.

Random unusual things about me

I used to play guitar in a heavy metal band and my wife was the lead singer!

I lived in Singapore without my family for two years when I was 17. I went to a United World College, trying to make a world without wars.

I once burned a rather large lawn with a failed toy chemistry set experiment.