Nicola “Gawaine” Racco

I'm Nicola, CTO and co-founder of CoNDENSE.tech. I live in Calco, in the Lecco area of northern Italy.

I've been writing software for about twenty years. I started with Java and .NET in the industrial sector, picked up Adobe Flash and Flex for hobby projects and game development, then moved to the web: Ruby on Rails first, then Python, and JavaScript and TypeScript later. As a tech lead at Mikamai and then Neosperience, I spent most of my time designing and running systems on AWS, which AWS once turned into a short story.

At CoNDENSE.tech we pair cloud-native architecture and infrastructure, mostly on AWS and Kubernetes, with agentic coding: agents write, test and review code on every project, while engineers own the architecture and the decisions. That's where most of my curiosity goes these days: how agents change the way we build software, and the agentic products they let us build.

Outside work I'm the father of a little girl, and I love it: she gets most of my free time these days. Video games get much less of it than they used to, but when I find an evening I still tinker with game development, mostly procedural generation. I also bake bread and sweets, and I prefer sourdough bakes. It's my hobby away from tech and the best way I know to unwind. And there's something deeply civilised about it: every fold and every rise follows a process people have refined for more than four thousand years, one that helped shape the societies we live in.

I like sharing what I learn and speaking at conferences and meetups, and I do it whenever I can. The talks are listed below.