Hybrid Hacker Director of Cloud @ Namecheap Italy online since the BBS days

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MAIN MENU

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1 · WHO'S THERE?

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My name is Nicola Ballotta and I like to call myself a hybrid hacker. Not the break-into-things kind — the kind who is curious about too many things at once and keeps trying to wire them together. Technology, teams, products, a soldering iron. The interesting results usually come from the seams between them.

I have been online since a modem made noise doing it. That is roughly where my taste comes from: systems you can read end to end, things that work without asking permission, and a certain fondness for text on a dark screen.

The seam I care about most right now is AI — something to build with rather than to have opinions about. This site is a small piece of evidence: it runs on a Kubernetes platform I designed and operate together with an AI agent.

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2 · DAY JOB

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now
Director of Cloud at Namecheap, one of the largest domain registrars in the world. I lead four engineering teams building the Namecheap Cloud products.
flagship
EasyWP — managed WordPress hosting built on Kubernetes, hosting thousands of sites. The most active thing my teams run.
focus
AI, at every level: how my teams build, what goes into the products, and what I run myself. The interesting question was never what it can do in a demo — it is which parts of the way we worked survive contact with it, and which ones deserve to be replaced.
before
I owned a web and mobile agency, ran a funded startup, and freelanced for well-known Italian and international firms. Entrepreneurship first, leadership second.
writing
I launched The Hybrid Hacker, a newsletter I wrote weekly for a couple of years, read by tens of thousands of engineers and managers. I sold it, and the archive is still up.
shape
Writing software full-time was never the job, and I stopped pretending otherwise years ago. I read and debug most languages, and I am a decent bridge between technical and non-technical people. Growing talented teams is the part I am actually good at.
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3 · TOOLBOX

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things I can do

  • +Kubernetes and containers — since the 0.x days, genuinely in love with them
  • +Private and public cloud, hands-on with both
  • +CI/CD pipelines and GitOps practices
  • +Building with AI daily — agentic workflows that ship, not demos that impress
  • +Taking an engineering organisation through the AI transition: the tooling is the easy half
  • +VMware, KVM/libvirt and OpenStack, in an earlier life
  • +AWS, GCP and DigitalOcean when the job calls for them
  • +Assembly, for fun, badly, on purpose
  • +Whatever way of working the team actually needs — I have tried most of them and adapted all of them
  • +Hiring, growing and leading remote teams — 15+ years of it

things I cannot

  • -Public speaking. Not my natural habitat, and still something I work on.
  • -Maths. My mind is too flexible to accept it.
  • -A long list of other things I intend to get to.
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4 · OFF DUTY

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  • [**]Doing my best to be a good dad
  • [##]Italian, so: cooking and eating, taken seriously
  • [>>]Learning. Then learning about the learning
  • [//]Pushing AI models until they break, then working out why
  • [<>]3D printing
  • [()]Robotics and electronics — Arduino, Raspberry Pi
  • [::]Home automation, and automation in general
  • [==]Growing the home lab
  • [__]Mechanical keyboards
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5 · DOORS

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  • [L] LINKEDIN the professional record
  • [G] GITHUB code, automations, experiments
  • [B] BLOG technical notes and hybrid geekeries
  • [N] NEWSLETTER founded, written, sold
  • [C] CV the formal version of all this
  • [X] X short thoughts
  • [I] INSTAGRAM the offline me
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NICOLA.XYZ · 9600 8N1 · thanks for calling