Career & Impact
I've been at IBM for over 20 years. I co-founded and currently lead IBM Skills Network, the team and platform behind IBM's courses and labs across Coursera, edX, and CognitiveClass.ai. Our platform covers the LMS, the delivery pipeline, automation, support, and Kubernetes-based lab environments where learners run real code in the cloud.
I manage developers, data scientists, designers, and marketers. Developing engineers is the part I'm proudest of. I've hired hundreds of technical interns who went on to perform well beyond their years of experience.
I co-founded Cognitive Class and helped grow it as its Marketing Lead from zero to more than 3.5 million learners worldwide, organically, with no marketing budget.
Awards & Recognition
- UBC Supervisor of the Year, 2024
- University of Calgary Supervisor of Merit, 2025
- Brandon Hall Silver Award (team tools)
- IDC CIO Award Canada (team tools)
- IBM Outstanding Technical Achievement Award
Teaching
I teach under my own name on Coursera, edX, and Cognitive Class. My course Generative AI: Prompt Engineering Basics on Coursera has reached over 669,000 learners, with a 4.7 rating and 97% recommending it.
Across all platforms, my courses on prompt engineering and conversational AI have passed 1.1 million enrollments.
Security Notice
Scammers are impersonating me on WhatsApp. A group called “Introduction to Artificial Intelligence (AI). Study Group” uses my name and photo, along with IBM and Coursera logos, to promote crypto trading “classes” and fake live sessions, then asks people to send a direct message for “account setup.” It has no connection to me or to my courses.
What I will never do
- Run WhatsApp, Telegram, or other chat groups for my tech courses.
- Offer trading or investment classes, or message you about crypto.
- Ask you for money, wallet details, passwords, or ID.
If you’ve been contacted
- Don’t send money or personal details, and don’t join meeting links they share.
- Report the account and the group in WhatsApp, then leave the group.
- If you’ve already shared anything, contact your bank or exchange right away.
- For course questions, use the official discussion forums on the course platform.
Numbers used by the impersonators so far: +44 7345 041559 and +44 7721 221076. They can switch numbers at any time, so treat any unsolicited message in my name with caution.
Not sure whether a message really comes from me? Email [email protected]. My official social profiles are linked at the top of this page. Thank you to the learner who checked with me directly and reported this.
Engineering
I'm a hands-on engineering leader. I was a software developer and technical advocate at the IBM Toronto Software Lab for many years, and I still ship code.
I built Linguetto end to end. I write the Python data pipelines behind Italy with Antonio, turning ISTAT demographic data into choropleth maps, alongside image processing and EPUB generation. I run Any New Books, including an agentic curation workflow that handles the first pass on new releases.
Earlier, I wrote the original DB2 adapter for Ruby on Rails, which IBM has shipped and supported ever since, and received an Outstanding Technical Achievement Award for it. I created the Ruby Benchmark Suite and ran the Great Ruby Shootout, VM performance comparisons that language implementers used as a reference. I was an early adopter of Rails, Django, and Elixir, and brought each of them into IBM.
Books
Technical Blogging, 2nd Edition
The Pragmatic Bookshelf. First edition 2012, second edition 2019. Also available as an audiobook.
Ruby on Rails for Microsoft Developers
Wrox, 2009.
I also wrote a regular column for PragPub magazine for many years.
Projects
Programming Zen
My long-running programming blog.
Linguetto
Adaptive Italian language learning app.
Italy with Antonio
Substack about Italy and Italian culture.
Cognitive Class
Learning platform I co-founded. 3.5M+ learners.
Any New Books
New book releases notification service.
Photography Portfolio
My photography portfolio.
Beyond Work
I'm Italian, naturalized Canadian. Outside work, I write a Substack about Italy and the Italian language that has reached Bestseller status. My hobbies include photography, fishing, reading, and exploring the outdoors.