My name is Gian Paolo Jesi, and it all started with a triangle.
As a kid I had a Commodore 64. Programming fascinated me, even though I had a rather muddled idea of what it was. One day my best friend, armed with a few scraps of BASIC learned at school, wrote me a program that calculated the area of a triangle. I was convinced that programming meant “making the computer think”, a bit like on Star Trek. Instead, all it took was base * height / 2. I was left speechless, and I’ve never stopped since.
The road wasn’t a straight one, though. I went to a liceo classico, the Italian high school built around Latin, Ancient Greek and philosophy. Then I earned a degree in Computer Science and a PhD in distributed systems, between Bologna and Amsterdam. I spent thirteen years in research, in Italy and abroad, and in 2018 I moved to the private sector, still in research and development, but finally closer to home.
Today, with artificial intelligence, computers look a little more like the ones I imagined as a kid. That’s why I wanted to build one at home: to understand how it really works and what it can do. That’s what this blog is about. You’ll find the project described on the home page, and the story behind the name in Why Schifanoia?.
Away from the keyboard, you’ll find me riding my motorcycle, with a book in hand, or watching a film, preferably on the couch at home with the sound system on.
How I work on this blog#
I write the articles myself, by hand. I use AI to proofread and edit them and to help me run the site: given the topic, it seemed only fair to say so.
Contact#
Questions, corrections, ideas or just curiosity: write to me at gp.jesi [at] gmail [dot] com. The code mentioned in the articles is on my GitHub.