My name is Andrea Ruggiero. I’m an entrepreneur with a passion for technology, photography and travel. I live in Lecco; I grew up just down the road, in Galbiate, where I lived with my family until I moved out.
Online I’m almost always Pupax. It’s the nickname they gave me at the parish youth club when I was little, because of my chubby cheeks. It stuck.
What I do
I’ve been writing software since primary school: I started with PHP, out of pure curiosity. My first real job was at Libraesva, from 2018 to 2020, where I brought Email Archiver to life and took care of its entire backend.
In April 2020 I founded One AM together with Luca Sarti, because I wanted to build something of my own and be personally accountable for the choices, from the idea to the result. From a small core we’ve grown into a team of about thirty people who design web applications and custom platforms. Getting a company off the ground took, for a few years, pretty much all the time I had, and it’s also the reason this blog went quiet.
With One AM we relaunched AutoSuperMarket, one of Italy’s leading car marketplaces, and since January 2026 I’ve been its CTO. It’s the most adventurous part of my work right now: TV ads, traffic spikes to handle within a few seconds, problems that don’t have an answer already written down somewhere.
At some point I had almost stopped writing code, except for the really complicated stuff. With artificial intelligence I started again, because I can finally focus on the problem instead of the keyboard. And that’s what I love most: give me a hard problem to solve and I’m the happiest person in the world. Give me something boring I could do with my eyes closed and you’ve lost me.
How I got here
Before work, there was Minecraft. Between 2013 and 2015, as a kid, I made a name for myself in the community with the “Pupax launcher”: a modified version of the Feed The Beast launcher that let people run the big modpacks even without a premium account. A lot of people used it, enough that it still shows up in Google results today. That led to custom launchers for the teams building modpacks for their communities: each with its own branding, its own packs and its own servers. It was my first real project with real users, and also the first one with real problems.
In high school, at the Badoni in Lecco, a group of four of us built the official app for Wikimania 2016 and the infrastructure that kept it running for over 1,200 attendees. Then came Argon, BonAppétit and the hackathons: two Global Game Jams, HackTheAlps, Hack the Cloud. You’ll find them all among the articles.
When I’m not working
I don’t have much free time, and when I do, I leave. I like slightly adventurous trips, ideally to remote places, to tell through photos and videos. I carry a Canon R6 with a 24-70 f/2.8 and a 35 f/1.8, plus a 50 f/1.4 and a 70-200 f/2.8 from the old EF series mounted with the adapter. And a DJI Air drone. The phone when I can’t be bothered, or when I don’t have the right lens.
And then there’s Lego. I’m crazy about the Technic supercars and I have them all: Bugatti, Lamborghini Sián, Ferrari SP3, Koenigsegg.
This site is my diary: my travels, the things I’ve built and the hurdles I had to clear to make them work. If you need the serious version, there’s the CV.
To write to me: [email protected].