Adriano Foschi — Projects, experiments and lessons from 20+ years of building software — what I've built, and what I'm building now. (page 2)
The freelance years: real clients, and a lesson school never taught me
Freelancing was the first time nobody vouched for the work but me — and the first time I learned that technical skill alone isn't enough.
Graded by someone who didn't understand what I'd built
A university exam graded on usability and security, a BlaBlaCar clone built with an early MVVM framework, and the grade that revealed the professor hadn't understood what he was looking at.
A prediction game with no fees, and the server that keeps time for it
A prediction game only works if a one-dollar bet is worth placing, which rules out any chain that charges fees. Koinos charges none — but it also has no oracle, so the clock and the price come from a server I wrote, and that server is the trust model.
My thesis: Hadoop vs. MySQL, and an honest result nobody expected
For my computer science thesis I built the same data warehouse twice — once in Hive, once in MySQL — and benchmarked them head to head. The new technology didn't win by default.
A migration with no undo, and 2,000 users in three weeks
In late 2023 I rewrote the data model of a crypto wallet that was already installed on real phones, redesigned its interface, and ran a giveaway that took it past 2,000 active users in three weeks.
The blockchain that felt like web2, and the mobile wallet it was missing
In 2023 I found a blockchain whose developer experience looked like ordinary web work, and no native mobile wallet for it. So I wrote one — and the hard part turned out to have nothing to do with cryptography.
Building software my school needed
Everyone expected me to choose the liceo. I picked a technical institute for computer science instead — and spent the first two years doing accounting.
I didn't want to trade crypto. I wanted to build on it.
In 2020 I bought crypto like everyone else. By the time I found DeFi, I realized what I actually wanted wasn't to trade it — it was to build on it, and Solidity's learning curve sent me looking for something else.
Building was always the point
From LEGO ziggurats and a 1998 Pentium to hex-editing FIFA files by hand: founding footballmatch.it, building a suite of import tools, and landing a Superpatch on an Italian magazine's cover.
My space, my challenges, my memories
I build, I experiment, I learn — and from here on I'm writing it down, instead of leaving it in my head or in a conversation I had once.
