About

Hello, my name is Carlo, I m originally from Italy, born close to a big northern city (Milan, anyone?) but grown up in a far smaller village about one hour south of Milan, where my parents moved when I was 3. My closest neighbor’s house was about 500 meters, all around me were fields or crop, tomatoes, lots of craws, even more cows (if you have not tasted milk freshly milked, you have to try it!) and small barnyards animals have been my play companions for years. It was very nice.

I have too many interests to count. I’ve always been really into arts, history and science so when I had to decided which direction to take in my academic life I had a lot of options and a lot a a tough time making I choice. I eventually went for music: I studied Organ and Composition in Parma. It turns our making a living with music is harder than I thought (or maybe I was too distracted by my other interests to give it my all), so I decided to follow another of my interests and switch keyboard. I got a job as Junior System Developer for Cedacri: I was doing a bit of everything in the IT department, from help maintaining and managing servers and clients across on-prem distributed branches all over Italy to building an internal software distribution which later become the home-build software distribution and remote management system. I was self-taught and I took all opportunities I could to learn on the job.

Fast forward 5 years and I landed a job as Support Engineer at Microsoft. I was part of the Internet Dev EMEA team, our focus was to help customers, big and small, with their web applications and assure they were running smoothly. That was deeply technical job, I had the opportunity to learn advanced troubleshooting techniques (memory leak dump analysis was one of my favorite), I was working daily with customers from all over Europe and the Middle East on all sorts of cases: performance problems, crashes, exceptions or sometimes consulting on the best way to implement a certain functionality. It was fun and I grew a lot. I started as Support Engineer and eventually I became Support Escalation Engineer, a sort of Tier 3 support for tougher cases.

As all good things tend to come to an end, I decided it was time to moved on, I wanted a new challenge, I wanted to learn something new, and that required a good amount of energy on itself. Figure out what to do next, where to go and what to look for. At that point in my career I had worked as a Windows and the Web developer, then joined Microsoft and worked helping other developers fix and improve their web applications, I figured the next logical move after building and troubleshooting was to run web application on a large scale. And I mean large.

It was the end of 2012, the cloud was becoming popular and Azure was starting to become a thing so I thought why not?

After a (long) interview loop, weeks dealing with bureaucracy and paperwork, more cardboard boxes that I could count, 5,385 miles and a mad rush across Heathrow Terminal 5 hoping to not miss our connection, we finally landed in Settle ready for a new life.

Since the beginning of 2013 I’ve been working as Service Engineer (the modern term now is Site Reliability Engineer) for various Azure services, I survived a few reorgs, learned a lot and grown in the role, really got into tools and technologies I was only vaguely aware existed till that moment, started to lead a small but passionate team of Service Engineers… 
This is a dynamic environment, I’m curious to see what will come next.

Here are some of my social links you can use to follow me if you like:

• Twitter: https://twitter.com/_carloc
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/carlo-cardella-3464884/
• Github: https://github.com/carlocardella
• Flickr: https://www.flickr.com/photos/87212486@N07/