Maybe Ciro Santilli should do something useful and remarkable so that someone might actually want to read his biography in the first place. But hey, procrastination.

Ciro Santilli was born in Brazil in the small/medium city of Rio Claro, São Paulo (~200k people in 2020) in the State of São Paulo in 1989 AD.

When he was 3, the family moved within Rio Claro to Av. 44 - Parque Universitario, Rio Claro - SP, 13504-360.

In 1995 the family moved to Jundiaí (Rua José Milani, CEP 13207-691) for his father's work. He played a lot on the streets. Ciro learned to cycle there on a slight downhill. He was mildly bullied by some kids on the street. He played NES games that were far too hard for him which made him made and required his parents to call the teenage neighbors to beat. The neighbors had some DOS games which felt like mystery and magic.

In 1997 family finally moved to Santos, São Paulo, Brazil again for his father's work.

At the age of 10, Ciro Santilli spent 10 months in Coventry, United Kingdom, where he greatly improved his English.

After Coventry, Ciro's family went back to Santos, São Paulo, Brazil, which made a deep impression on Ciro, until he Ciro Santilli's undergrad studies at the University of São Paulo in 2007.

In 2010, as mentioned at Section "Ciro Santilli's formal education", Ciro as admitted in a double degree program at the École Polytechnique, France, where he stayed until 2013. Going to France was a mind blowing, life changing event.

Firstly, in 2012, while he was at École Polytechnique, Ciro Santilli was introduced to LaTeX (thank God for French mathematical obsession), and his mind was blown:he though. Why isn't everyone doing that!

One particular event stood out: Ciro made a small change to his teacher's course material, who blessed be him (dude's a legend, Ciro just noticed he has some Chinese publications with another French dude, e.g. www.amazon.co.uk/高效算法-应试与提高必修128例-克里斯托弗-Christoph-Durr/dp/B078SJQPVK "High-efficiency algorithm competitions 128 examples", did he write it the Chinese himself?? Must be of course to complement the notoriously low French professor salaries), made it available, and then Ciro gave him back the .tex file. Ciro was just a bit worried about how the teacher would be able to tell what he had changed in the file to validate the change. The teacher just said of course, "no problem, I'll just use diff". Ciro had never heard of diff. Let alone Git of course, though yes, this was a bit early in Git's history version control systems had been around since forever of course. This was 2011 or 2012, about 4 or 5 years into a superior education curricula with various courses involving computers, some requiring quite a lot of "fill these empty functions" style programming. Education is a joke. Anyways, this was a prelude to exactly what Ciro wanted to do in OurBigBook.com. This might have been the one actually: webia.lip6.fr/~durrc/Iut/Notes580.pdf

Not long afterwards, Ciro started playing with Linux. Until then, Ciro had had some contacts with the mysterious operating system at university, and was a bit puzzled what the point of it was! He clearly remembers:University should be forced to use only open source software and hardware in undergrad teaching courses by law BTW.

Then came an Ubuntu live disk on his own machine, and finally a measly 40GB dual book partition in a Microsoft Windows machine on a laptop. At first, it took a lot of time to learn all the crazy new terminal stuff! Yes, at this point, Ubuntu was already usable enough without the terminal, an accomplishment actually. But as a programmer, Ciro felt obliged to learn. Many hours were spent reading man pages at the library. But it all just felt so right, and sometimes powerful... true wizardry.

And ten years later, Ciro was seriously considering buying a computer without Windows pre-installed. He had not used Windows a single tie on a personal machine even once in those ten years!

Finally, to finish things off Ciro found two websites that changed his life forever, and made be believe that there was an alternative: Stack Overflow and GitHub.

The brutal openness of it all. The raw high quality content. Ugliness and uselessness too no doubt. But definitely spark in a sea of darkness.

Major projects can be seen at: Section "The most important projects done by Ciro Santilli".

A summary of minor projects is given at: Ciro Santilli's minor projects.

This section is a dump for anything else, to keep those sacred first sections that show on the top of the homepage clean.

One day, someone will invent a way to take the hash of a piece of hardware and see its history log, like software engineers do with version control. Until then, this is as close as you can get.

Ciro one day guessed that hardware would certainly be a slang for something naughty, and yup, here we are: www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Hardware, drug paraphernelia. Read on!

Maybe those are genial. Maybe not. Nostalgia is just too strong to discern. Ciro still goes back to them for rest.

It should be a crime to automatically generate ASCII art from images.

For some ASCII art in the Bitcoin blockchain see: ASCII art.

Random fun mentions:

        z

        ^
        |    *------*
        |   /|      /
        |  / |     /|
top -------*------* |
        |  | *----|-*
        |  |/     | /
        |  |      |/
bottom ----*------*
        |  |      |
        +--|------|-----> y
       /   |      |
      /    |      |
  x  /     |      |
    v
          left   right

Ciro Santilli used to read books when he was younger (Harry Potter up to the 4th, Lord of the Rings), but once you are reading code, technical articles and news the whole day, you really just want to watch videos of people doing useless things on YouTube to rest, enough text.

Books are slow. No patience. Need faster immediate satisfaction.

Paradoxically Ciro feels like he's becoming a writer of sorts though, one semi independent section/answer/piece of knowledge at a time.

Writing is not just giving out information. It is re-feeling it.

One of the things Ciro Santilli most deeply despises.

Real luxury is to understand quantum field theory and number theory.

Clothing/jewelry/car luxury is at worst a way to show off. And at best a replacement for nature/the countryside. People living in big cities have lost nature, and to some, looking at luxury goods (or watching television) serves as a (unsatisfactory) replacement.

Ciro Santilli took courses once upon a time, maybe that has influenced his passion? Ciro Santilli's musical education.