Corso! The journey begins

26 Oct 2025

Why blogging?

After over a decade as a software engineer working with various businesses, mostly as a Senior DEV, the last five years have been dedicated to leadership roles as an Architecture and Tech Lead. I decided to become an independent contractor. I recently became a father, and a big challenge is ahead, but I am very excited about it. The first step was to start working on my own, gaining control of my schedule and choosing projects I want to pursue. I have many ideas and experiences from 12 years in the industry to share. We will explore my journey in building real software and sharing honest opinions about related topics. I hope the free spirit will find meaning in this.

Hey Corso!

To start, I spent several years working for companies and my GitHub portfolio was outdated, not showing what I could contribute to others. In recent years I’ve been crafting the art of secure elegant code, this opened an new avenue of knowledge in cybersecurity, and I now dedicate part of my time to study and understanding the hacking mind and developing mine. (instead of chasing some AI hype).

The major goal here is building something that:

• Showcases my skills in the portfolio
• Creates actual value for my own use (maybe others later)
• Revisits programming foundations

Instead of abusing well-known libraries, why not create my own? Of course, keeping the balance - I’ll still reuse existing code where it makes sense. But every sprint, I want to explore at least one web infra aspect that’s usually hidden in some library, like:

• ORMs
• Web Servers
• WAFs
• Storage
• Caches
• Security & Encryption

When it came to build my first app, I thought in build something useful even if for my solo use, then building security dashboard sounded like an appealing choice, but it can have thousands of features that I would build. Checking my credit card expenses I saw 1Password, then it clicked, I’ll start by building a password manager to store accounts safely and save me up some costs. The name? not sure… just think, then weeks passed… I’m stressed let me take my dog Tom to the walk… Tom is a nice dog, he does not care about anything just enjoy the moment hmm… A guard dog maybe?… Cane Corso! sounds good.

The first iteration

I think the best contribution in terms of product management that the whole agile and scrum hype gave was on shipping working software frequently in small cadences, this tends to avoid over-engineering practices and make sure you are getting something done for real, you are not working in overwhelming behemoth for 2 years at the end you lost all the time-to-market and motivation. Unfortunately, this is often explored as a tool to pressure teams on delivering and releasing low quality software in aggressive deadlines. Nowadays those strategies are well adopted, however still hard find architectures, managers and Tech Leads equipped with proper mindset, knowledge and tools to build high class software every iteration mostly still stuck with old fashioned waterfall habits, continuous delivery practices is the key and more on that will be explored here.

I’ll try ship something every 2 weeks if not shorter, this is a system that I found which can release some dopamine in my rush brain to keep going, otherwise I just get bothered.

The goal of this first iteration is to deliver basic CRUD operations to handle the accounts. I’ll work part-time on it to balance with my consulting work.Lot’s of heavy lift will be needed, so I cannot be aggressive.

Principles

• Start small and simpler as possible (YAGN),
• Evolutionary architecture in mind (just enough).
• Quality is not negotiable
• Explore and build own infrastructure.

Sprint 01 (2025-10-27 | 2025-11-07) - Features

• Create new account
• Search accounts
• Update accounts
• Encrypted file storage Keepass like

This will be a series of posts and in the end of each iteration I’ll write here the progress. The write-up will be my retrospective call.

You can find the code on GitHub, talk to you in the next one, enjoy!