About me

My name is Cristian Cassetta.

When I was 8 years old, in 1984, my parents bought me a Commodore 16. I was obsessed. I would spend hours copying pages of BASIC code just to see an extremely pixelated hot air balloon fly across the screen. What excitement!

Seven years later, when I was 15, I upgraded to an Amiga 500. I managed to get hold of a software called Amos to make video games. The documentation was all in English, so I had to translate it word by word using my dictionary to barely understand it. But it was a lot of fun!

My first job after school was for a small start-up in Milan, where I was in charge of digitizing and retouching a massive database of photo films for the DeAgostini group using Photoshop. While I was there, I started experimenting with HTML and CSS and built a few websites. Macromedia Flash was the hot front-end technology at the time, and I learned to create some cool animations using ActionScript.

A few years later, I started using Joomla and WordPress. After that, I took a break. I worked in the hospitality industry in England and then back in Italy for the next 20 years, with a brief period in 2007 when I worked for Google for 2 years as a "web quality rater." I didn't need to write code, but I had to evaluate websites to see if they deserved their ranking. I needed to read the code to see if they were using unethical techniques to climb the rankings. It was a fully remote position, quite unique for that time.

For the last 15 years, I managed an exclusive villa in the Tuscan Hills, which was the perfect setup to raise my two newborn daughters. Web development remained a hobby during that time until four years ago, when, like many others around the world, I was stuck at home, rethinking my career choices. I decided to rekindle my genuine interest in writing code and studied HTML, CSS, JavaScript, then TypeScript, React, Svelte, Astro, SQL, Git, and more.

I've made a few websites and apps, some of which are represented in this portfolio. On June 10, 2024, I moved with my entire family, my South African wife and our two beautiful, smart teenager daughters—to the Netherlands in search of a job as a frontend web developer. The rest is yet to come.