User:Alessandro Ghignola

My name corresponds exactly with the nickname I've used to sign up here and through which you're accessing this page, although I'm not the only one with that exact full name in the world, and especially, I know for sure there is at least another person with that exact name and who's also from my same city, ie. Pisa, Italy. To hopefully facilitate disambiguation, I shall point out that I was born on December 30th, 1975. I don't know when the other Alessandro Ghignola was born, but I assume he wasn't born that exact same day as well.

The precise reason why I had signed up here, was the intent of occasionally contributing to articles concerning my own projects; I might as well ensure that none of those articles was ever created, or even remotely touched by me in person. Ideally, I would contribute by dropping relevant notes on their talk pages, as happened in the case of L.in.oleum. Although my English presumably appears to be rather fluent, when trying to explain something I typically end up in a labyrinth of useless details, while amost entirely forgetting the original topic, and that's the reason why I'm happy to leave the task of writing/editing articles to better qualified volunteers.

I'm a programmer. More specifically, I've moved my first steps in writing sequences of instructions for a computer to follow, in the early 80's, using Commodore's BASIC. I soon became fond with this kind of activity, for reasons yet to be determined, and thus attempted to choose appropriate schools, finding out that my own interest in information technology was often slightly ahead of my own country's interests of those years. I had just bored myself to death in the wrong schools, when I finally tried university, hoping it would be more specializing. However, once there, I learned that I should have tried to focus on small, simple programs which workings would have been completely predictable and known in advance of even compining and running them, which sounded to me as an exact opposite of what went on throughout the history of the most longeve, profitable, and best known exemplaries of computer software. I left that weird place to never get back, and for a couple years worked at personal projects, such as Noctis, making extensive use of the most blaspheme design anti-patterns and the most headache-generating coding styles, along with gargantuan messes of hacks to make a silly object-oriented compiler digest some real code. And no, that's not connected with the fact that it worked in real addressing mode. It means real, and you either know what I mean or I just cannot formally explain.

Having met the Internet in 1998, the next year I decided I needed to create a personal site somewhere. It's still alive as http://anynowhere.com and mainly hosts my no-profit projects, although a little community has then grown around them, with members adding their own projects to the whole. At the time I'm writing this, Wikipedia hosts entries for at least a couple of these projects: Noctis and L.in.oleum. The first is an old MS-DOS game I'm endlessly trying to build a long-awaited sequel for; the second is the programming language I'm writing the sequel in, and is also currently a work in progress, albeit very close to a first alpha release.