Meet Ferdinando Messina: SwissBorg’s Senior Mobile Engineer
Ferdinando Messina grew up in Sicily in the small town of Sommatino. He had a happy childhood, one of three brothers, raised by his father, a doctor, and his mother who is a science and math teacher in middle school, among a big extended family of seven aunts and uncles. His interest in computer science began early, from his early teens Ferdinando wanted to be a computer engineer. At the age of fourteen, he started to play around making his class’s first website. From then on he spent much time programming for websites, his first experience in coding. He was fascinated by the fact that he could create something by giving orders to a machine.
After high school, Ferdinando travelled to Milan with his identical twin brother who wanted to become a doctor. He attended University Politecnico of Milan, where Ferdinando pursued his passion for computer science. The energetic and competitive young man from Sommatino found that University was stimulating but not very practical. He enjoyed furthering his knowledge of math and physics but couldn’t find any projects with practical applications. What changed the course of his learning was a semester with the Erasmus student exchange program in Sweden’s Orebro, where his studies changed from the very theoretical to the more practical. He spent a whole semester working on projects that he was assigned. At Orbero Ferdinando realised that he could work on concrete projects while studying. With the advent of the iPhone, he began brainstorming ideas for an app. His first app was a guide to seaside beaches of Sicily, a simple app that took Ferdinando one month to make, but it got a lot of downloads, and he tasted his first income from building an app. After building two or three more apps, he started receiving the first job offers before he graduated University. In this way, his passion for building mobile apps happily turned into his career.
Ferdinando’s first job was working at a start-up that was building mobile apps, which he enjoyed enormously. His wife began a position as a biomedical engineer at EPFL, which brought Ferdinando to Lausanne where he worked for a company in secure communications. For the next six years, he worked on building apps to improve the privacy and the security of users communications. He learned to work with a team and, at the same time, started mining bitcoin with a group of friends. Ferdinando describes with the excitement of someone who has opened a box of treasures, how he realised the way finance is conducted would change radically. He believed in the idea of a more open financial ecosystem, so he got more involved in crypto and blockchain and witnessed the problems and obstacles facing the space.
Ferdinando, the kid who made his class its first website back in Sicily, saw that to bring about the more open world of finance that he envisioned, mass adoption was necessary. To reach mass adoption, problems needed to be solved. Among these problems, Ferdinando recognised, one of the biggest was the fact that using cryptocurrencies was very complicated for ordinary people.
For almost a year Ferdinando Messina looked to see how he could be part of the solution in the world of crypto. He pondered how to make crypto accessible to everybody by creating an app.
In an announcement for the position of Senior Mobile Engineer at SwissBorg, he saw his opportunity to enter the space that had him so engaged and fascinated. Ferdinando was excited about starting something from scratch for a start-up that had gained a reputation for raising a successful ICO positing a new era of financial wealth management. He truly believes that mobile will help crypto achieve mass adoption, “I saw in SwissBorg the possibility of entering this important and exciting space. SwissBorg was a great fit because it addressed the problems that I wanted to solve, our main objective is reaching mass adoption and simplifying the process of crypto investment to give ordinary people access. I want to help build this solution.”
SwissBorg is Hiring! Find out if one of our promising positions is meant for you: https://jobs.lever.co/swissborg
