I am the (currently on sabbatical) president of Biodec Srl, an ICT service provider which, since its foundation in 2003, has chosen to use only free or open-source software. More information at http://www.biodec.comI have a Ph.D. in Chemistry (the computational variant) and I have been involved in R&D (computational chemistry, bioinformatics) for a substantial part of my professional life . As a side effect, my activities often brought me into (hard, face-first) contact with parallel and distributed computing, monitoring, virtualization, automated deployment, configuration management, turning me into a (sort-of) system engineer too.* IT infrastructures & automation.* Scientific computing.* Applied R&D in Computational Biology and Computational Chemistry.* Machine learning.