I’m Vincenzo Ampolo (goshawk), an open source technology enthusiast, wanna-be tech entrepreneur and computer engineer (Politecnico di Milano university, Milan Dec 2012) year 1987.

Biography

I was born in Sicily, Italy. From my childhood I was really enthusiast about technology. But until 10 I was not able to have a computer. At 10 I recycled a Intel 386 pc to be my own. It’s when I learnt about Dos and Windows. At 14 I switched to Mandrake Linux 8.2 and from then I never went back. Tried Red Hat, Slackware, OpenSuse, I fell in love with Debian and later on, Ubuntu.

When I was 15 I coded the first linux usermode bootsplash screen that didn’t need to patch the kernel. It was called usplash then Splashy.

When I was 20 I founded eshopen.com, a online marketplace to sell Arduino and Freerunner devices and components. I was the first an only distribuitor of Freerunner in Italy. As research I ported Android 2.1 (It wasn’t mainstream at the time and It was just being released) to Freerunner like this video demonstrates:

All my researches about freerunner are available in this blog.

When I was 21 I revamped the gdc (Gnu D compiler project) which is now published on bitbucket durin my course of Formal Languages and Compilers. I left the gdc development later on because my interests switched to python, javascript, data visualization and web interfaces. Researches on this field are available here.

While I was undergrad and in grad school I was also a consultant for some small companies in Milan, Italy. At 24 years old I moved to Davis, CA, USA and started an internship in Riverbed Technology.

Lately a started a library to add nanosecond support to the python datetime module.

Info

@vincenzo_ampolo on twitter

My facebook profile

My google+ profile

My Linkedin profile

My github profile

My CV (automatically generated from my Linkedin profile, may be outdated)

My graduation master thesis about recommendation systems