Introduction

My name is Alberto Milone, software engineer and singer-songwriter, born in Turin in 1983, raised in Lecce (Italy), now based in Sweden. Here are some details you might want to know about me.

Education

  • BA in English and Spanish (2005) at Università degli Studi di Lecce.
  • MA in English and Spanish (2008) at Università del Salento.

Interests

The English language, Free Software Development on GNU/Linux, and Music (you can find Unreliable, Sommarnatt, Misplaced Nostalgia, and on Spotify). Not necessarily in this order.

Job

I have worked as a software engineer at NVIDIA since 2024, where I lead an effort to automate software packaging and release. Before that, I spent over 14 years at Canonical (2009–2023), working on hardware enablement in Ubuntu.

Areas of expertise

  • Build and release automation
  • Debian/Ubuntu packaging (I am an Ubuntu Core Developer)
  • General software hacking (I love fixing bugs and adding new features in programs)
  • Hardware enablement (kernel/X.Org hacking)

How I got involved in software development

After deciding never to deal with Windows again, I struggled with some rather nasty hardware problems on Linux. Needing a computer that worked properly, I ended up learning much more than I apparently needed, teaching myself how to program, so as to be able to automate all the things that I had learnt.

The first program – and probably the most popular program of mine to date – that I wrote for Ubuntu is “Envy” (later to be known as EnvyNG”). It solved a simple problem: downloading, properly installing, and configuring the NVIDIA graphics driver. A rather daunting ask back in 2005. The program became so popular that it was adopted by Linux Mint (codename “Bea”) in 2006 and by Ubuntu (“Hardy”) in 2008.

Needless to say, that was just the beginning. I wrote Envy as a student, and after my Master’s I volunteered on Ubuntu for about a year before joining Canonical in 2009 to maintain the NVIDIA drivers and the Ubuntu Driver tool. Funny how computer issues can change your life for the better — and even funnier that the little tool I wrote to install NVIDIA drivers in 2005 eventually led me to NVIDIA itself. Life, much like good software, occasionally comes full circle.