About
Ciao! I'm Alberto Schiabel (/al'bɛrto ski'abɛl/), known as @jkomyno online.
I'm a software engineer, computer scientist and conference speaker. I'm also a seasoned open-source contributor that works on developer tooling and AI agents.
I've worn many hats throughout the years. I've gone from co-founding a travel-oriented startup at 19, to researching novel mathematical optimization algorithms, to porting Rust code to WebAssembly + TypeScript for a living.
The thread connecting all I've done is: I followed what I found interesting and challenging at the time.
Location
Where I'm based and where I come from.
I work remotely, and I'm currently based in Tbilisi, Georgia. I was born and raised in the territories of the ancient Serenissima Republic of Venice, in what is now north-east Italy. Thankfully, that gives me a pretty strong passport. I grew up close to the H-Farm tech hub and startup incubator, which is where I participated at my first hackathons.
I speak English, Venetian, and Italian fluently. I can get by in Spanish, and pick up enough German, Turkish, and Russian to navigate a menu or read street signs.
Past Lives
Before my work took over.
In high school, I made it to the finals of the national RoboCup Jr Rescue Maze competition in Bari, with my classmate and friend Simone Simonella. We assembled a Lego Mindstorm EV3 robot that could autonomously navigate a maze, detect victims, and report their positions. The path-traversal and backtracking problems I solved there became the seed for a warehouse route optimization project I'd build for a client years later.
In 2015-2016 I was also a prolific tech blogger for Androidiani.com, where I wrote over 300 articles for an audience of ~100,000 monthly Italian readers. There, I was among the first people in Italy to strike review deals with Oppo, Umi, and other Chinese smartphone brands that were virtually unknown in Europe at the time.
Skydreamer
The startup that started it all.
I'm into traveling to exotic destinations when work allows. That passion turned into a job once: at 19, I was a founding engineer of Skydreamer, the first European app that turned traveling with friends into a swipe-and-match game, offering thousands of curated destinations and fine-tuned travel packages.
It was my first, chaotic experience in a remote startup, at a time when I didn't think having a daily office job plus university to study was enough. Building Skydreamer exposed me to web scrapers, Redis caches, and rudimentary recommender systems. That experience influenced me to double down on Redis for my BSc thesis project, and to study machine learning during my Master's.
Education
Formal training in computer science.
I have a Master's in Computer Science from the University of Padua, where I majored in Machine Learning and Software semantics. I graduated with full honors in December 2021, with a focus on combinatorial and probabilistic methods optimization.
My research thesis - on lattice submodular maximization, a class of optimization problems where greedy algorithms work surprisingly well - was a collaboration with the Czech Technical University in Prague. You can read my thesis "Advances in Submodularity: Optimization and Probabilistic Models", or the published seminar paper on arXiv.
Free Time
What I do when I'm not coding.
I travel to places most people need a map to find, pet cats, hike mountains, host karaoke nights, and visit ruins of fallen empires. I spend time with my family, compose music on Guitar Pro 5, and play Age of Empires II.