I was born in a small countryside village in Italy, Santa Cristina di Borgomanero, a wonderful and quiet place on top of a hill with a spectacular view on the whole Alps! Since I was a child my parents used to take me to my dad’s concerts – he’s a pianist and my mum loved to choir for his band! Anyways, I think that opened up my life to strong and remarkable experiences which helped me out a lot in the early days, giving me a “different way of seeing life”, as someone would say! During the elementary school I was already playing with computer’s hardware and software – but hardware was my favorite part as, I guess, was something a child can understand better than software! I set up my first Windows OS when I was 9, I guess, and since then nobody could stop me. I was (and still am) the reference point for IT problem-solving in my “village town”!

After a couple of years, I remember it was about 1999 I’ve started my first website – which I still have somewhere. It was these two blue HTML pages hosted on some free space – I guess it was Kataweb or something similar, and my nickname Andy90 came up!

During the middle school that website became something more interesting, I wrote my first “web-app” which was basically a VB ASP based system connected to an Access Database able to handle some documents my classmates wanted to share with the world! It was almost amazing because everyday it had some problem and I was always ready to solve them!

Somehow I begun to work at some parts of my dad’s project – he’s the person who brought me into electronic and software stuff as he’s always been passionate to it! It’s amazing, I was about 13 and I was playing with Flash which was Macromedia and not yet Adobe, it had that wonderful round red logo, I loved it! I’ve also printed out a version of an Actionscript 1.0 Cookbook which I think I’ve never read!

In the meanwhile middle school ended up and I was ready to begin a technical school where I was supposed to study a lot of informatics and electronics. Unfortunately it didn’t finish like that but I’ve learnt a lot by myself and had a lot of fun. By the end of the last year at the high school I was nearly working as freelancer web-developer for an Irish guy who I met during a stage in Londonderry and some local events websites. I’ve changed my programming style thousands of style and I still don’t know which one I prefer but I’ve always felt that there’s something really important behind the web and that’s what I’m leading to since the stage in Northern Ireland. I stop trying to guess Java and C# code and totally switched to a more web oriented style of my creations, I got deeply into PHP and Javascript and some publishing platforms such as WordPress.

Later, after high school graduation, I took a two-weeks journey to the United States, more precisely to California, ehm… To San Francisco and the Silycon Valley. I was looking for an inspiration and I think that America left me something really interesting that I still don’t feel. I re-styled my website which is now looking pretty funky – andreaepifani.com, and started to think about projects for the future even if I didn’t realize any of them yet! That year I also begun the university, back home in Italy. The first year went pretty well and I was absolutely convinced that I made the right choice!

At the end of the first year I’ve applied for an exchange program between my university, Politecnico di Torino, and Shanghai’s Tongji University for one year. And here is where I am now, in China! Something really changed this year. And that something is that I don’t feel anymore so much into engineering – not in the way people is used to think about it at least! I need something more colorful to study and to work on, and I have an extreme need to travel and discover the world. China amazed me with her extremely deep culture and traditions that I really feel something like the World is calling me!

I still don’t know what the the next years will be about. For the moment I’m getting closer and closer to my final exam for graduation from university which will be the starting point for all of my life! Oh and while studying I keep working for the Irish guy and some new (and old) italian local realities, I still believe in the web and in its future as a wonderful tool for everyone!