I'm Riccardo. I enjoy new challenges and learning new things. Furthermore, I'm an incurable optimist who loves implementing tools to enable people to work on their goals, and finding solutions to hard problems.

Currently, I’m working on Google Distributed Cloud air-gapped (GDC), Google’s digital sovereignty vision for a fully managed cloud experience, helping our partners to support public-sector customers and commercial entities to address data residency and strict security and privacy requirements.

I earned a Master’s Degree in Computer Science, graduating from Technische Universität München, with a focus on Security Engineering and Language Theory.

My daily job

As a Senior System Development Engineer, I am focusing mainly on helping our partners running GDC, performing deployments, and enhancing operations.

Previously, I worked as Platform Engineer for Dock Financial (now out of business), as Solutions Architect at Nextbit, and as JavaScript Developer at Fleetster, and some other roles. You can find a more precise timeline on my LinkedIn.

Open-source contributions

A big part of my passion, and my knowledge, of IT related topics, is due to open-source. I started contributing to Ubuntu when I was young, becoming quickly an Ubuntu member. I wrote different apps for Ubuntu for Phones, including 100 Balls, Discerning Duck, and Falldown.

Nowadays, the huge majority of my contributions go towards GitLab, being them code patches, issues, advocacy, or simple support on StackOverflow or the GitLab forum. Following all the contributions, I have been recognized as a GitLab Hero.

Bug bounties

As RMS said, hacking means exploring the limits of what is possible, in a spirit of playful cleverness.

I like breaking things to understand how they work, and hacking exercises, of course, a considerable appeal to me. Among the other things, sometimes I have fun reporting security issues on different websites. You can find a report of my 2019’s activity on in this blog post. An always up-to-date source of my activity can be found on HackerOne.

The rest of my life

While my online-persona is quite focused on C.S. related stuff, I have an entire life out of the internet, with a funny Italian accent, enjoying life with my S.O. in Munich. If you want to know me better, just drop me an email, and if you are ever in Bavaria, let’s have a beer!

Contact me

Find me on LinkedIn or just say Hello at hello@rpadovani.com.