Get to know about Mariano Spadaccini

Welcome to the monthly series Meet The Champion.

Last month we declared Avery Adams, the winner of June 2023.

Today we are talking to Mariano Spadaccini, the winner of July 2023 of The Weekly Challenge. I hope you are going to enjoy the interview.

Mohammad: Tell us about your technical background?

Mariano: From age 10 to 14I loved programming in Basic 1.0 on CPC 464. Some were nice programs for a little boy, the last one was too big for the memory (nominal 64kB) :-( After some programming at school, 2 years in Pascal (only a few hours a month), the last three years in computer science course (essentialy programming in COBOL and other languages, intro in operating system, …). But in the last year I got acquanted in the school laboratory with Internet, so my thirst for IT knowledge has significantly increased. At university little computer science, but a lot of mathematics, physics and electronics. In any case I had discovered the Internet, so I was passionate about GNU/Linux and Networking which I cultivated as much as possible. Over the last 20 years I have often changed jobs, especially as a systems engineer, but also as a backend programmer (now I do both).

Mohammad: How/When did you start using Perl?

Mariano: The first contact occurred in school lavoratory (~1998/99) through CGI programming, but I wrote the first professional script in 2005 as System Administrator. The most important online resources were PerlMonks, but I liked reading the books Beginning Perl, Learning Perl, Intermediate Perl, …

Mohammad: How did you come to know about The Weekly Challenge?

Mariano: I think via Gabor Szabo/Mohammad Anwar’s Perl Weekly newsletter.

Mohammad: What do you like the most about The Weekly Challenge?

Mariano: I really like. When I have a little more time, I write solutions in multiple languages, and it is nice to face problems with different approaches.

Mohammad: How much time you dedicate every week to The Weekly Challenge?

Mariano: I always try to carve out some time to tackle the challenges in Perl, I would say between 20 and 40 minutes, but if I can I also dedicate a few hours with other programming languages. And if with Perl my first aim is to have fun, I admit that I also use challenges to try my hand at other languages. Surely the next one will be Rust.

Mohammad: Do you checkout others solutions and who is your favorite?

Mariano: I usually do not see other solutions, but Monday or Tuesday I read PerlWeekly and sometimes come across nice posts. And yes, among these there are algorithmically interesting solutions. In this intersection, I often read the blogs of Flavio Poletti, Luis Mochan, Roger Bell West.

Mohammad: What do you suggest someone just started The Weekly Challenge?

Mariano: Have fun!! :-)

Mohammad: Anything else you would to like to share with us?

Mariano: Thanks to all of you for the effort and for the interesting problems always there waiting for us!!

That brings the end of the conversation with Mariano Spadaccini. Please do let us know your view. We will come back next month with another champion.