About myself and this site

If you landed here it probably means you have questions either about who I am or about this site you’re on. I’m gonna attempt to answer them all!

TL;DR for the people with short attention span

Manuel “Manu” Moreale, was born in 1989 in Italy where I still live. Developer and designer freelancer since 2011, and I have written on this blog since 2017. You can email me at [email protected].

Extended bio

Born in North-East Italy on the 6th of July, 1989. That's 6/7/89 if you write dates like a sane person and that also makes me a child of the 80s—albeit, just barely. Went through the school years doing the absolute bare minimum to be above average and spent way too much time playing both video games and basketball. After High School, I tried to study architecture and quickly realised university wasn't for me. Dropped out, went on to study graphic design and a bit of web dev. Ended up loving the web part and I taught myself through trial and error how to code websites.

In 2011 I decided that rather than looking for a job it was a good idea to make a job for myself and so I started working as a freelancer, a decision I sometimes regret. Never had an actual job, never worked 9 to 5, never had a salary, never took a paid vacation. I have no idea what the typical job world looks like and the only thing I know is that I work probably too much but also not enough. If you’re a freelancer like myself you probably understand what I’m talking about.

I still live in Italy, I despise cities, love nature and the mountains. I'd love to buy a piece of forest at some point and move there. Hopefully, I'll be able to afford it in the future even though that feels highly unlikely.

An unexpected series of events lead me to have a terrible abusive relationship with a 50kg dog that I sometimes hate but most of the time I’m happy to have him around.

On the Web

I retired from social media ages ago and my content lives in two places: this site and Buttondown where some of my newsletters are hosted (although I am considering moving the archives here as well). There are traces of me in a few other digital places but I'm slowly retreating from those as well because I truly believe social media is pointless. The only space, outside of those mentioned above, where I'm active is are.na.

About this site

I designed and coded this site and it’s still in active development since I constantly tweak small things here and there. It’s powered by Kirby, runs on a Hetzner VPS, domain is managed by Hover. The typeface is Iowan.

I don't run analytics on this site. The only collected data is what's inside the NGINX access logs so IP addresses, user agents and requested pages. I don't do anything with that data because I couldn't give less of a fuck about it to be perfectly honest with you. Sometimes I grab it and check for errors or to see if anything unusual is happening at the server level and that's about it.

Want to know something else?

I am a big fan of emails. My inbox is open to everyone and I’m down to talk about everything. If you have questions about myself, this site, the web, or literally anything else, feel free to get in touch at [email protected]. You can also use that same address to ping me via Apple Messages if you’re in the Apple ecosystem.