Giorgio Garofalo
Back when I first got access to our family computer at the age of 8, I was instantly fascinated by the number of things one could do with it. Aside from playing Space Cadet, I was obsessed with a single word: create.
I used to spend hours googling how to create characters, how to create games,
how to create websites,
trying to learn everything I could about making things.
It was when I found out about GameMaker that
my passion for software development truly ignited:
I was finally able to create my own games from scratch (kind of),
and that gave me an incredible sense of freedom, accomplishment,
and motivation to keep learning.
It wasn’t long before I wrote my first lines of code, modding Minecraft
in ways that give me a good laugh today.
← that’s me
Fast forward to this day, create is still my favorite word, whether it’s about software, design, or art. I graduated in Computer Science and Engineering, and that gave me a solid foundation to build upon, while keeping my curiosity and passion alive. I’m an advocate of clean code, good design, and user-centered development, and an absolute open source enthusiast.
Now, the pinnacle of my creation journey is this website that you’re browsing. What?, you might ask. It’s such a plain website, where are the flashy animations and creative stuff you’ve been bragging about? Well, this page was made with Quarkdown, my labor of love, that I built from the ground up, backed by the experience that you can only get by creating things over and over again, failing, learning, and improving.
Projects
I lost count of all the projects I’ve started throughout my journey in the field. Some reached completion, many have never seen the light of day, and only a handful became something I’m truly proud of.
Here are my favorites:
Quarkdown
Born as a simple parser and renderer for a custom Markdown flavor, it has evolved into a full-fledged typesetting system.
Focused on ease of use and versatility, it allows generating papers, books, presentations, knowledge bases, and simple websites.Pikt
An esoteric programming language, where programs are represented as images, and each pixel’s color encodes a specific instruction.
Made for fun, it turned out to be surprisingly powerful and Turing-complete, with both a JVM compiler and an interpreter.Animated
A JavaFX library that adds support to implicit animations, typical of modern declarative UI frameworks like Flutter or SwiftUI.Chorus
The first YAML editor built specifically for Minecraft configuration files, with useful completions, previews, and a built-in SFTP and FTP client.
Experience
I’m currently based in San Francisco as a full-stack engineer at Falconer, a startup focusing on building companies’ knowledge bases. I’m mainly contributing to the development of their visual editor.
In the meantime, I’m also completing a Master’s Degree in Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Bologna, after earning my Bachelor’s Degree in the same field in 2024.
Previously, I worked at Cosmobile, leading the development of a modern iOS app for internal use.