About me

I’m Andrea Brancatelli.

I was born on April 12, 1979, in Trieste.

I’ve been around computers since I was a kid. At six, a ZX Spectrum had already caught my attention.

Almost at the same time, I started listening to my parents’ vinyl records. Dire Straits, Franco Battiato…

My very first 7-inch single came when I was seven, back in 1986: “Once Upon a Long Ago” by Paul McCartney. I had asked for it because I’d seen the video on the late, great VideoMusic.

Then the years went by.

A bit later (must have been 1987?), I started playing the keyboard.

1988 came along with my first 80386. Right before that, I had already discovered modems and BBSs. DESQview and my first DOS-based multitasking experience.

Fast-forward to 1995: the bass guitar entered my life. Always with a pick, of course.

Then in 1996 came IBM OS/2 Warp. That’s also when I started collaborating with the City of Rome on the creation of the Rete Civica Romana, the city’s very first civic network.

In 1998, I landed my first official job as a sysadmin at Consorzio Lavoro e Ambiente. That’s when PHP and MySQL entered the picture. And also when the big hopes for Java quickly crashed with the death of OS/2.

Still in 1998, I opened my own recording studio: Raged Studio.

1999: my first tour in Germany with the Chiquita Ska Band, right when the album “Singles” – recorded in my own studio- was released. I even signed one track, “Turisti di guerra”.

Still in 1999, I joined the newly born Shots in the Dark as their keyboard player.

That same year, I also landed on AIX and Oracle at the BNL datacenter.

In 2000 came the first Shots in the Dark record, “From Kingston to Rome…”, entirely recorded in my studio.

Then came FreeBSD 4.5. It was 2002.

In 2003, the second Shots in the Dark album, “Shots from the Ghetto!”. This time drums (and bass) were tracked at Elefante Bianco in Rome, but everything else was done in my studio. I mixed and dubbed the whole record.

2004: I founded Raged Records and produced the first album by Prisoners.

After that, I went on producing Rancore, Verrospia, Burn Out, Green Mary, Klaxon, Latte+, Antistamina, Shots in the Dark, Mamacalura, Grand Theft Age, System.out… and probably more I can’t even remember.

On December 9, 2006, at 3:25 PM, Dario Brancatelli was born.

In 2007, I left the keyboards in Shots in the Dark to switch over to bass.

That’s also when VMware came into the picture. I was fooling around with Linux Debian, Fedora, and all that good stuff.

In 2008, I stepped in as guitarist for Antistamina.

I became a VMware Certified Professional.

That same year, the third Shots in the Dark album, “Spaghetti Skank!”, came out – this time fully recorded in my studio.

In 2009, the first Antistamina record, “Contrasti”, was released. I signed one song: “Libertà apparente”.

I bought a Prius. Living hybrid meant consuming – and polluting – a bit less.

I spent a month in Helsinki. Life there felt good. Why not move there someday?

2011 – Raged Records shuts down (or rather, went bankrupt?) with an embarrassing amount of debt, which required years to pay off. With it, the dream died: the dream of giving a voice to those who had none, of changing the world one record at a time, of making life something to enjoy instead of an alienation.

I “adopted” the MySQLfs project, which had been dormant for a while.

In 2012, we toured Germany with Antistamina. Huge satisfaction.

That same year, I officially became IT Manager at Schema31, also taking on responsibility for cybersecurity and privacy.

2013 – I got my BSD-A Certification.

In 2013, I came up with Storage31, a distributed, redundant, deduplicated Storage-as-a-Service platform that became one of the building blocks of Schema31’s software projects.

2014 – I became Schema31’s Head of Digital Preservation, leading a colorful, diverse, inspiring, slightly crazy but super tight-knit team of DevOps (about 8 people). Thanks to them, we managed to bring to life Schema31’s entire cloud computing platform, gCloud, starting from the evolution of the original Storage31 project.

In the following years, I became Schema31’s Chief Technology Officer, focusing on building automation tools for software compilation and deployment using Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery. That work laid the foundation for a DevOps approach – before DevOps was even trendy.

2016 – the Tacita record “Oltre il muro” was released, with me on guitar. I recorded and mixed it myself at Raged Studios. It’s a record I’m still really proud of artistically, one that I still enjoy listening to. Even though, looking back, I know I worked on it under tough technical conditions and without giving it the priority it deserved. Still, it turned out to be a great record.

2017 – a new EP by Shots in the Dark came out, “Unchained”, recorded and mixed by me at Raged Studios, where I – as always – played bass. It featured three ska tradition covers and the special participation of Mr. Roy Ellis. That same year, Tacita also released a new single, “Canzone Arrabbiata”, with me on guitar as usual. Recorded and mixed at Raged Studios, it was first included in a compilation album for Kurdistan, and later re-released in 2018 on Tacita’s “Apri gli occhi”.

2018 – “Apri gli occhi”, the second Tacita record, was released. I played guitar and also contributed a song I had written, “Ancora qua”, with lyrics by Andrea “Gargiulo” Intoppa.

2019 – Covid hit, and with it came a whole series of projects supporting local regions and Civil Protection (especially Calabria’s), focused on managing the emergency. Digital services for citizens, patient tracking, movement permits, mobile apps for citizen information. That’s also when I got passionate about NoSQL databases – especially CouchDB – while my team started developing in React and React Native.

Almost at the same time, I actively took part in designing an IoT telemedicine platform that collected data from WiFi-enabled ECG patches, allowing Holter monitoring remotely with much less hassle for patients. As part of this project, we also ran some machine learning experiments aimed at detecting ECG anomalies in a guided way.

Musically, in 2019 I also contributed to the release of “Papillon” by Dalton, a rising Roman band. The album had been previously recorded at Hombre Lobo Studio, but I finalized and mixed it at Raged Studios.

2021 – my decade-long collaboration with Schema31 came to an end. I left behind a team that had grown to about 40 people spread across three locations in Italy – with a smile, and with the awareness that I had built human bonds even before professional ones. I took on a new role in the Architecture group at OCTO Telematics, a multinational company specialized in remote vehicle monitoring through IoT solutions that analyze driving styles, reconstruct accident dynamics, and much more. Within the Architecture group, I became an IT Architect focused on Infrastructure and Cloud. That’s when I began diving deeper into microservices-based approaches to support the various software platforms running at OCTO Telematics. I also took on a Cloud Governance role, with the goal of optimizing costs and streamlining both software and hardware platforms.

2022 – the new Shots in the Dark album “Chicken Blues” was released, with me on bass in about half the songs. The record was half-tracked at Raged Studios and half at Chicken Sombrero Studios. It also marked my departure from the band, due to disagreements over the sound direction the album should take.

July 2025 – my journey with Octo Telematics came to an end. After several intense and rewarding years in Architecture and Cloud Governance, I closed that chapter with the awareness of having learned a lot, contributed even more, and pushed myself well beyond the boundaries I had when I joined.

I bought another Prius. Some habits don’t change.

And then, finally, the move to Helsinki. A decision I had been toying with since 2009 became real: I packed up, left Italy behind, and started a new life in Finland.

August 2025 – I joined Veikkaus as an ICT Architect, focusing on turning into real products what the company had already built during its monopoly years. A brand-new and exciting challenge, one that takes me out of my comfort zone but has me fired up and ready for it.