Ciao 👋🏻 I’m Edoardo, a Senior Frontend Developer based in Vienna with an Italian background and nearly a decade of experience.
I do creative frontend development, mostly. But over the years I’ve touched pretty much everything: backend, CMS, e‑commerce, design systems. If you want to put a label on it, full stack design engineer is probably the closest.
I’ve worked with clients like Buck, Disney, Porsche, Red Bull, Le Labo Fragrances, and Getty. Outside of client work, I like to write technical articles and recently started writing for Codrops as well. When I’m not at my desk, you’ll find me at the gym, out for a coffee with my girlfriend and my dog Emma, or on my gravel bike. I eat pasta every day and consume an insane amount of caffeine.
Showreel
What has being part of the Okay Dev community meant to you?
I only recently joined the cult, honestly. But it’s been great. There’s something rare about being in a space where you can talk to some of the best developers in the industry and just feel surrounded by people who care about the same things you do. There are so many web developers on the planet, but the truly good ones? You could probably fit them all in a mid-size Slack channel ;)
What got you interested in the web industry?
My father sat me in front of his Windows 98 laptop when I was 5. A huge black brick. I couldn’t read or write yet, just clicking things around with no idea what I was doing. Something about it stuck. At 14, school introduced me to programming: logical diagrams on paper first, then writing Java by hand. Web came later, at 17, through a university course that lit something up. I found Codrops and the award sites and immediately understood that this was a genuinely creative medium. I spent six months going deep: replicating famous sites, breaking apart how they were built in DevTools, training my eye for animation and CSS. That was it.
How did you learn your craft?
I went to an IT high school, then started a Computer Science bachelor and dropped it. The formal side gave me the foundations: algorithms, logic, how to think about a problem. The rest I built myself. On the web side, the real school was replication. Find a site I admired, build it from scratch, understand every decision. Award sites were my curriculum. The visual and creative side came entirely through obsession and repetition.
What was your first industry job like?
My first real taste of the industry was an internship at a software house when I was 16. I picked up JavaScript and jQuery there, and spent most of my time training an early machine learning model to recognize and read gas meters automatically. Optical character recognition on utility hardware, basically. Interesting problem for a 16-year-old.
But my first real freelance project came shortly after. I had just finished Maximilian Schwarzmüller’s React course and landed a small web app and game for ETUI, through an agency based in Brussels. Built with React. Nothing huge, but it was the first time I shipped something for a real client and that feeling of ownership was different from anything school had given me.
What’s on your desk?
A 16-inch MacBook M1, still going strong. Next to it, an Apple Studio Display, which is honestly a piece of art. A NuPhy Air75 V2 mechanical keyboard and an MX Anywhere 3S mouse. Other than that, the desk stays clean. I can’t work in clutter.
What are your go-to apps?
VS Code and Cursor for coding, Figma for anything design-adjacent, Notion for writing and thinking. For testing and debugging: Chrome, Safari, Firefox, the iOS native emulator, Xcode, and then the whole web.
What inspires you?
Other creative developers, mostly. The Codrops community, award sites when they surface something genuinely new. Architecture and product design, because the same problems keep appearing across different mediums. And the browser itself: working within a technical constraint sharpens creative thinking in a way that total freedom doesn’t.
Lately I’ve also been finding a lot of inspiration in retro tech products. I can’t fully explain it, but I have a thing for floppy disks. I had the pleasure of dealing with some as a kid and something about that era of hardware just stays with me.
Do you work best in silence, or do you prefer some background noise or music?
Absolute silence. I can’t focus with anything playing in the background.
Which project(s) are you most proud of?
I’ve shipped dozens of projects over the years and I’m proud of all of them. But there’s a special place in my heart for the ones from before the AI era. The ones where you’d sit with a problem for days, go through a small existential crisis, and then eventually, somehow, find the solution. That process built something. You can’t shortcut your way to that kind of understanding.
Build log
More recently, since going back to freelance, the project I’m most proud of is Anuc Home. It was my first Site of the Day on a project I owned 100%, as a freelancer. It also picked up an FWA and got recognized across several design inspiration sites. I jumped out of my chair when I saw it and it took me a good 30 minutes to calm down. That one is special.
Anuc Home Website
I’m also weirdly proud of my personal site. I never designed it properly. I sketched something quickly and then iterated directly in code from there. This version has lasted 7 months already, which for me is basically a record. I keep finding excuses to add new features to it.
Portfolio Website
What’s your perspective on AI, and have you integrated it into your workflow?
I’ll be honest, I was skeptical at first. But I use it a lot now, for the right things. AI handles the mechanical, repetitive work. The monkey work, as I think of it. That frees up more time for the part that’s always been the actual job: thinking.
There’s this thing happening now where people measure software success in lines of code. “tOdAy My AgEnT wRoTe 50k LiNeS oF cOdE!” Cool, congratulations. But good software has always been the opposite: how much can you solve with the least amount of code. Removing code is the real optimization. Always has been.
Are there any technologies or tools that you’re excited to explore more?
Keeping up with the tech industry today is basically a part-time job. Before it was a new JavaScript framework every week, now it’s a new AI tool or model every other day. At some point you just have to pick your battles.
Practically speaking, I’d like to go deeper with Astro. Version 6 just dropped and there’s a lot there worth exploring.
Any advice for aspiring creatives?
Build things you don’t know how to build yet. That’s the only way the skill actually compounds. Study the work you admire closely, not just visually but technically. Understand why it works, not just that it does. And care about the code as much as you care about the result. The codebase is part of the craft.
One more thing: don’t let AI shut your brain off. You are the brain. AI cannot think. It’s a very big, very impressive prediction machine, but the thinking is still your job.
