Massimiliano Aroffo

I’m Massimiliano Aroffo. Most people call me Max.

My Twitter bio is the shortest honest version of me I’ve managed to write: Father of two, sea lover, geek, lifelong learner, agile practitioner, software craftsman, cat herder. Each of those is load-bearing, and the order is roughly the order in which they show up on a normal day.

What I do for a living

I’ve been writing software professionally for over 25 years. At the very end of the 1990s, almost without planning to, I ended up doing what today would be called the CTO role at a small Italian startup. From there I kept moving through positions that asked for both deep technical work (development, and system administration back when the line between the two was thinner than it is now) and the messier discipline of running the teams that did that work. The places, in roughly that order: Motonline, Editoriale Domus, Sinapsi, Energeya (now FIS), ShopFully, and Iungo, with some combination of CTO, VP Engineering, and CISO on the title line. I built and scaled engineering teams, ran AWS and GCP migrations, and picked up enough cybersecurity work to end up as CISO and DPO in a couple of those places. The full timeline is on the long-form CV.

A few years into all that, a mentor put Daniel Goleman, Daniel Kahneman, and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi on my reading list, and the way I thought about my own work shifted in a way I have not been able to undo since. I had been a tech enthusiast first and a manager second; those three, and more recently Marshall Rosenberg on Nonviolent Communication, flipped the order. I stopped treating people, relationships, and processes as the soft annex to the real work. In most weeks they are the real work, more than the code is.

Despite all of that, in 2025 I went back to writing code full-time, and moved back to Sardinia at the same time. The two decisions were related. Professionally, I wanted to spend my days inside an AI-assisted workflow rather than reading about it: there is a difference between hearing about Claude Code at a meetup and watching an agent quietly delete a function you’d just spent forty minutes designing. Personally, I had been away from the sea and from my old friends for too long, and I wanted both back. The contradiction with the previous paragraph is not lost on me. I am also more satisfied with this setup than I expected to be.

Today I split my time between two roles. I’m Principal Engineer at HikmaAI, a Responsible AI Security Platform on GCP, and I continue with Wishew as Cloud Architect on the Go backend I built there last year. Both jobs are Go on GCP. Most of my week splits between system design, code I write, and code an agent wrote that I now have to review, and the proportions of those three have shifted enough in twelve months to be worth writing about. That shift is what most of this blog is about.

What this blog is, and isn’t

This is not productivity content and it is not AI hype. The honest take on AI-assisted engineering sits somewhere unflattering for both camps, and the posts here try to land there.

The recurring themes:

  • AI-assisted engineering: Claude Code, harnesses, modular skill systems, agents that delete code they don’t understand
  • Cognitive load: how AI moves it rather than reducing it
  • The talent pipeline: if junior developers learn through the work AI now does, how do they get to senior?
  • Performance engineering: real Go and Postgres optimisation from production systems, including a 75% latency reduction story
  • Policy and ethics: occasional notes on DeepSeek and the censorship layer, on the Italian working-hours law, on what we build and why

Posts are written with AI assistance for literature retrieval and drafting, with manual editing throughout. I read the source papers I cite directly, not AI summaries of them. When I get something wrong, I correct it openly.

Outside the screen

With my family on the beach

A wife, two kids, and a Golden Retriever.

Half an hour from home there is Geremeas, on the south-eastern coast of Sardinia: a long beach, an open sea, the kind of sunsets that earn their reputation, and most importantly a group of friends I met there. They are wonderful people, and thankfully none of them share my trade, which is probably why they keep me light. For about ten years now we have been renewing the same summer ritual. More than anything else, that is the reason I moved back.

Geremeas at sunset

Connect

For the long-form CV and side projects, maroffo.github.io.