Hi!
My name is Francesco Tonini, I am currently pursuing a master in Computer Science at the University of Trento, Italy, and I ❤️ programming.
If someone would ask me “When did you start approaching computers?" I would not be able to frame anything in particular. However, I believe that the foundations of my career began to take shape way before I had the opportunity to touch a computer.
Throughout my childhood Legos have fueled my days. I have always been fascinated by those tiny, simple, cubic-shaped bricks that through meticulous and simple steps became complex structures and buildings. The sky was the limit.
Then, years went on and Legos started to fade in the background. If only there was something else made of elementary bricks from which I can build anything.
You know where I am going. I do not remember when I had my first date with a programming language1 but it felt like the next big thing. Things quickly blew out and I was writing software for everything that came to my mind2. Then came graphical interfaces and with that, mobile app development. Back then I had a Lumia 925 and I enjoyed building apps for Windows Phone. It was a beautiful playground to improve my programming, UI, and UX skills. I got the chance to publish some apps to the Windows Store and they got a fair bit of traction. One was a music game where you had to guess songs from multiple options.
After the Windows Phone departure, I decided to take a break from app development and work on something different. At the time Telegram just released their bot platform and I jumped on the train with a friend of mine, Matteo. Not only did I took a break from app development, but also from C#, the only programming language I “really” knew. Matteo and I started working with node.js and within some months we released two bots based on that framework: TrackBot and PriceTrackBot. Soon enough both of them became very popular in Italy. While PriceTrackBot went offline some years ago, TrackBot is still available and does not stop getting better (and popular!).
When PriceTrackBot died, I decided to go back to my roots and start working on Android apps. Because of my previous knowledge of C#, I started building apps with Xamarin.Android. In September 2017 my first Android app, UniVR Orari, went online on the Play Store.
Today, my interests lie in deep learning and AI. I can’t wait to find my next project that, just like the others, will improve my technical skills.