About Matteo Stara
Who I am
I'm a Sr. Software Engineer. I write systems software in C and Rust. My personal technical direction is compilers, distributed systems, and low-level tools — the parts where text and protocols *magically* become running systems.
XDA / Memnoc
I got into programming through hardware. On XDA-Developers, as Memnoc, I ported ROMs to HTC devices — mostly back-engineering firmware from newer phone models to run on older hardware. I became an XDA-recognized developer doing that work. It's where I learned what it means to actually understand a system from the bottom up: no documentation, just binaries, diff tools, and reading what the machine tells you.
That background set a habit for customizing things in general.
Linguistics → languages
Alongside the hardware hacking, I studied Linguistics — a BA in Linguistic Mediation and then an MA in Linguistics: International Communication. Natural languages and programming languages have more in common than people expect. Syntax trees, grammar rules, ambiguity resolution, scope — these aren't metaphors borrowed from linguistics, they're the same structures.
Thinking back, that background is probably why compilers feel intuitive to me in a way that surprised me when I first found it. It also explains why I care about language safety and syntax design beyond just "does it compile."
Professional path
Linux and open-source years during my degrees. Then Android developer (Java) — natural step from the XDA work. Then frontend: HTML/CSS/JS, then TypeScript and React. I'm now a Sr. Software Engineer. Professionally, I use AI to help build connectors between software systems. Rust opened the systems world for me. It's where the language interest and the low-level interest finally connected into something I want to spend the next decade on.
Currently
I also study applied AI systems and write about what I learn. It sits alongside my systems work as an active area of personal study.
Working on StarScript — an early bytecode VM in C with a hand-built instruction chunk, following Crafting Interpreters as a learning path. The home-page demo is a standalone browser-side parser inspired by this learning path; it does not run or share parser code with StarScript.
Outside
I paint. You can find the work at labotteghina.gallery. I bake — bread, pizza, cakes. I build custom keyboards, which is an excuse to get closer to embedded hardware without committing to writing firmware full-time. Yet.