About me

Hello! I am Fabio Massaioli (a.k.a. fbbdev), a freelance software developer and PhD candidate from Italy.

I have been learning and practicing computer programming with various languages and technologies for almost 20 years, first as a hobby and later through freelance work for small businesses.

Education

I am currently pursuing a PhD in Logic at Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa, Italy. My research area is structural proof theory, a beautiful field at the intersection of logic and theoretical computer science.

I hold a Master Degree in Philosophy from Roma Tre University in Roma, Italy. At first I studied mainly ethics, philosophical anthropology and medieval philosophy, then I moved on to the philosophy of science and logic.

Research

Structural proof theory studies patterns of reasoning and rules of inference, and the interactions that arise between them when they are combined to form complex systems. It borrows techniques from the theory and semantics of programming languages, as well as from computability and complexity theory. It contributes back to computer science techniques for improving software correctness, like typing systems and formal methods for program verification.

Some of my research output is available at the writings page.

Experience

My freelance work has been mostly with small and individual businesses, developing software tools to improve their workflow or helping them set up their internal networking and online presence.

Since 2020 I’ve been developing and maintaining the virtual classroom implementation (video-conferencing UI and backend interaction code) at uwmeeting.com, a distance learning platform targeted to musicians and optimized for high-quality audio.

Since 2019 I’ve been developing and maintaining dedicated management software for Laura Costanzo a local distributor specializing in vine plants. The software tracks customers, orders, incoming and outgoing shipments and warehouse status.

From 2014 to 2020 I’ve privately tutored students in Computer Science from the universities Tor Vergata and Sapienza in Roma, Italy. I was delighted to see them graduate with great results and/or go on to start their own careers in this field, and I am honored to have been able to contribute to their success.

From 2012 to 2013 I developed and managed software for the annual quality assessment survey at my high school, both for the collection phase, and for the subsequent aggregated data analysis.

Open-source software

I develop and maintain some open-source projects, and over the years I have made contributions to projects by other people. Some of my own are listed here, while others, as well as the list of contributions, are available on my GitHub profile.

I am currently the maintainer of node-fastcgi, an npm package supporting the development of FastCGI applications in Node.js. This project has enjoyed some success as it is useful to people stuck with inflexible shared hosting environments.