[ kalizi.dev ]

me

Bondì Andrea aka kalizi

Lead SW Engineer @ eWake · Palermo, Sicily


background

Master's in IT Engineering, University of Palermo. 110/110 cum laude, Nov 2025.

Thesis: I designed a genetic algorithm that attacks language models - teaching a system to craft sentences that preserve meaning while fooling a fine-tuned ModernBERT. Benchmarked against state-of-the-art methods using an LLM as the judge. It worked.

Bachelor's: an indoor positioning system built on SVM and K-NN, in PHP and Laravel. The unglamorous stack teaches you the most.


work

At eWake since 2020, full-time since Oct 2023. Ecommerce, web apps, AI, infrastructure.

Freego: a 13-year-old B2B travel insurance platform serving 2000+ agencies across Italy. We rewrote it from scratch. Seven months. 46 releases with zero downtime in the first month alone. What used to require a developer to onboard a policy now takes an agency 8 minutes to do alone.

eClock: internal time tracking SaaS with something I'm quietly proud of - a pluggable anomaly detection engine with ten independent detector classes, severity scoring, and composite project health scores built from six weighted signals. It catches problems before people do.

A browser-based arcade game in Phaser 3 for a client's Christmas campaign. Thirteen scenes, twenty-plus characters, per-department gameplay variants, competitive leaderboard. Sometimes the job is making something that makes people smile.


independent projects

Swaplay (CTO, 2018-2021). Built the full product from nothing. 100+ organic beta users with zero promotion. Eight levels of viral referral sharing. Shuttered in 2021. I think about it sometimes.


elsewhere

Heavy metal is my reset button. Avenged Sevenfold above everything - Hamburg in 2024, Italy in 2025. I've seen Pinguini Tattici Nucleari four times, which confuses people who know about the metal.
Lately obsessed with chess.
Self-built PC (Ryzen 9 5900x · RTX 3080 · 128GB) and keyboard (Zoom75 · Jade Green · MV Terminal R2).
Learning Godot 4 because games should be made, not just played.


find me

medium · twitter · linkedin · stackoverflow

curious about the setup? /uses