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About
About

Simone Manfredi

I'm an amateur photographer based in Bologna, Italy. This blog is the home for my photography, travel stories, and personal projects.

It also serves as my very first front-end programming project, built from scratch to sharpen my skills in modern web development.

My Focus

  • Street Photography: I am completely in love with this style. I love capturing the spontaneous, everyday moments you find on city streets. Bologna is a constant source of inspiration for me with its lively energy, tourists wandering with amazed eyes, and its iconic, historic porticoes. For me, the camera is an essential travel companion that keeps me company on solo trips and gives me an everlasting reason to explore and find beauty in hidden compositions.
  • Travel: Since my very first trips around the world, I’ve been captivated by global diversity and cultural differences. Looking ahead, I plan to travel more and more, with my sights set on exploring everything from Asia to the Americas.
  • Mountains & Sports: The mountains—and the Alps in particular—have always been my safe space. It’s where I truly belong and find peace. From backpacking to mountain biking and sport climbing, the outdoors is my go-to place to recharge, exert my energy, and feel free.

My Work Life

  • Education: I have a strong scientific background, holding a degree in Physics from the Università degli Studi di Pavia.
  • Backend Web Development: For the past 4 years, I have worked as a backend developer at Globant. My main focus is building solid, high-throughput microservice architectures using Spring Boot (Java) for the insurance sector.
    My current and future focus lies heavily in AI and agentic programming to modernize legacy code, migrating old Cobol systems to modern Spring Batch pipelines.
  • Frontend Development: While frontend has never been my primary professional focus, this website is my first major personal project designed to help me understand the full-stack process.
    I built this site using a modern stack: Next.js + Sanity CMS + Tailwind CSS, leveraging modern agentic programming tools to streamline the build.

My Gear

For the vast majority of my photos, I rely on a simple, lightweight setup:

  • Camera:
    • Sony a6000: My main camera. It is older tech but incredibly solid and reliable. I look forward to upgrading it in the future, but I plan to stay within the Sony APS-C lineup.
  • Lenses:
    • Tamron 17-70mm f/2.8: My go-to, do-everything lens for travel and street photography. It's bright, internally stabilized, and exceptional for my daily needs.
    • TTArtisan 56mm f/1.8: My first prime lens for street photography. It is highly affordable and incredibly sharp. Starting out with a prime lens really helped me understand the fundamentals of composition.
    • Sony 16-50mm f/3.5-5.6: While it isn't the sharpest or fastest lens, it is incredibly cheap and lightweight—perfect for sunny hiking days where keeping pack weight down is crucial.

Let's Connect

Whether you want to talk about backend architecture, photography, or anything in between, I'd love to hear from you: