About
Code by day
I'm Carlo Gerla, a software developer. The foundation is Computer Engineering at Politecnico di Milano; everything else was built in the field, over twenty years of projects where the code had to work on Monday morning, not at the demo.
The core of my work is the systems that keep businesses running: ERP and CRM designed, extended and integrated with what's already there; mobile apps for field work; APIs holding together platforms never meant to talk. In recent years most projects revolve around applied AI: analysis and AI-driven video stream management (event detection, counting, real-time quality control), document automation, assistants that answer with real company data.
Then there's the part that touches the physical world, the one I enjoy most: complete delivery systems, from order to doorstep with real-time tracking; QR code ecosystems for menus, ticketing, traceability and payments; real-time dashboards, IoT integrations, and generally the kind of thing that makes a client say "wait, that's possible?". Yes, it's possible.
Every so often this craft spits out a tool I needed first of all for myself and that may serve someone else too: when it does, it ends up in Software, free and with no sign-up.
The common thread is pragmatism: software exists to solve a measurable problem. If it hasn't moved a metric after three months, it was decoration.
Pixels by night
Then there's the other half, and it starts long before the Politecnico. It starts at age 8, in front of a VIC-20, with Radar Rat Race: mice, cats, cheese, and a kid who at some point stopped asking how to win and started asking how it works. I never left that question. After the VIC-20 came the Commodore 64, the machine that taught me two things no modern framework does: that constraints are a teacher, and that 64KB is enough for magic if you know what you're doing. Retrogaming isn't display-case nostalgia for me: it's a gym. Writing a platformer in 6502 assembly, or driving a Mega Drive's VDP register by register, reconnects you with what code really is, under all the layers.
Today that thread has a declared destination. Not the assembler itself: I'd already crossed paths with it at university. The destination is building a game's core dynamics with the assembler: the main loop, the life cycle, jumps, shooting, collisions, end of level. Because it's romantic, because I love it, because down there the code has nowhere to hide. The vehicle is FIDATI., the HTML5 game, which keeps growing too, in features and depth; the first stop is the C64, and then there's the Mega Drive, the console that has always fascinated me and that I'll finally get to know from the inside.
This site exists to document the experiments born at that crossroads: games, improbable ports, odd tools. Some will work, some will collapse like a FIDATI. floor. I share both, the latter teach more. Nothing is for sale here: there's just an experience, and the wish to share it.