Hi, I'm Elia - I'm obsessed with building software that performs, scales and solves problems.
My love for building things started at age 14, when I launched an automated botting panel (instant followers, likes and views from the best farms during the renaissance of botting - TikTok views cost 0.0003$/1k at the time). My panel processed 100k+ orders, was relied on by major industry players - got me sued for not fully being GDPR compliant - and also got me into trouble when the school's AV flagged a YouTube Livestream Viewer script I wrote being present on one of my USB sticks.
Since around that time I've basically spent most of my free time tinkering with software and hardware (for a while at the time I also built, sold and repaired desktop PCs - also soldered a bunch).
Towards the end of my time at the Gymnasium (German high-school equivalent) I started my first (tech-wise) more proper project, Eternity, which began with a Discord bot solving a problem (renting out NFTs in a crypto game), that then spiralled into a multi-modal platform forming basically a monopoly on the rental market. Out of fun I also assembled an E-Sports team of the best players in the community that formed around the tool, that then went on dominating in various web3 tournaments for about a year. We even hit a LAN in Istanbul, Turkey.
In parallel I took my proceeds of my casino arbitrage operation (see side projects), and deployed part of the capital in DeFi across basically all major protocols and chains (on avg yielding ~30% APR) - things with quantifiable optimization potential are just fun to me, using only few understand adds extra to it. Since I got my whoop I also started optimizing health (exercise, movement, sleep) for similar reasons.
After securing my scholarship post-graduation and starting my studies, I got offered to work for a local property developer (mid-size, $30M AUM) that had some existing digital projects and wanted to spin up further ventures - my role started as engineering lead on a project, then gradually got extended until I took care of everything technical as CTO.
On the side I also did 95% of my CS bachelors (thesis this year), basically only showing up to exams w/ avg prep time of ~12h.
Beyond technical things I from time to time enjoy games (e.g. Civilization or Cities: Skylines), read light crime (e.g. Doyle's Sherlock Holmes) or thrillers (have a weakness for books from Poznanski and Eschbach), and rarely also consume high-quality visual content.
I get dopamine spikes from closing open ends, optimizing (anything), seeing load hitting infrastructure, processes clicking seamlessly, and observing highly performant systems. Sometimes I also dream about building things (or have nightmares about fictive 3rd order effects / bugs).