Sklivvz

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 helping build the largest remote company in the world.

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.

Hi, I'm Marco Cecconi. I am the founder of Intelligent Hack, developer, hacker, blogger, conference lecturer. Bio: ex Stack Overflow core team, ex Toptal EM.

Read more

Newest Posts

What can Stack Overflow learn from ChatGPT?

Stack Overflow could benefit from adopting a using conversational AI to provide specific answers

Read more
Fan mail

Multiple people with my name use my email address and I can read their email, chaos ensues!

Read more
Intelligent Trip

After years of building, our top-notch consultancy to help start-ups and scale-ups create great, scalable products, I think it is high time I added an update to how it is going and what's next for us.

Read more
Guest blog: Building, in partnership with communities by Shog9

A lesson in building communities by Stack Overflow's most prominent community manager emeritus, Shog9

Read more
Can you migrate a company from on-premise to remote-only?

Some lessons learned over the past 8 years of remote work in some of the best remote companies on the planet

Read more

Gleanings

How Aristotle Created the Computer
Chris Dixon • Mar 20, 2017

What began, in Boole’s words, with an investigation “concerning the nature and constitution of the human mind,” could result in the creation of new minds—artificial minds—that might someday match or even exceed our own.

Read more…