Toni
Masotti

Ciao! I'm Toni. By trade I'm an engineering leader; by formation I'm a linguist, a philologist, and someone who's been writing code on the side since he was fourteen so the way I think about systems probably owes as much to grammar and the structure of arguments as to anything I picked up from a CS curriculum I self-taught my way through. What pulls me in, professionally and personally, is the interface(s). The place where what a business actually needs, what good engineering looks like, and what the people involved are capable of delivering, all have to find an agreement. The translation work in both directions: taking business intent and turning it into something engineers can build, taking engineering reality and putting it in terms a stakeholder can act on. This is where most of the interesting problems live, and where I've spent most of the last five years. I lead engineering at a German company leading the mobility-benefits space, where I joined as the first internal hire and have been building the organisation I now run.

"Human systems, organisational systems, technical systems — they rhyme more than people give them credit for."

I still write code. Kotlin and TypeScript during the week, Rust and Python on the weekend, occasional detours into Zig, Nix, and much more. Partly because a technical leader who stops touching the keyboard slowly loses the ability to tell what's genuinely difficult from what's just badly designed. Mostly because I find it fun, and after twenty years that hasn't changed. I'm endlessly curious about how things work: distributed systems, languages I don't yet speak, why a postmortem on a Tuesday went one way and the same kind of incident months ago went another. Curiosity is THE working tool I try to put at the centre of everything: the next problem usually rewards the people who picked up the thing nobody made them learn. This blog is where I think out loud about engineering leadership, hiring and growing teams, modernising legacy without rewriting it, AI tooling without the hype, and the occasional idea that earns its detour.