For this conversation, I sat down with Roberto Capodieci, a technology entrepreneur, blockchain researcher, and one of those people who has seen several generations of computing from the inside. Our conversation started with something simple: coffee. As an Italian living in Bali, Roberto still begins his mornings with a cappuccino before jumping into work. It quickly became clear that technology has been part of his life for almost as long as he can remember. He started programming when he was five years old. By the age of nine, he was already making money from software. As a teenager, he founded his first company and built video games for the Commodore systems, working in C and assembly when every kilobyte mattered. Listening to those early stories was fascinating because they reminded me how different software engineering used to be. There were no online courses, no Stack Overflow, no AI assistants. Learning meant taking machines apart, reading manuals, experimenting, and spending hours on bulletin board systems with other curious people around the world. We also spoke about the early internet. Long before cybersecurity became a recognised field, Roberto was already investigating online scams. One case involved malicious dialers that secretly redirected people’s internet connections to expensive premium phone numbers. He tracked down the people behind the scam and shared his findings with the authorities, eventually receiving a letter of thanks from Bill Clinton. What quite surprise me wasn’t the technical achievement here. It was his motivation! He believes that when you understand how something dangerous works, you have a responsibility to help others understand it too. Whether it is exposing online scams or explaining how software really behaves, his goal has always been to make technology safer for everyone. That naturally led us into a discussion about trust. Modern software gives us switches, buttons, and settings that we simply accept. We click “disable”, “private”, or “do not train on my data”, but very few of us actually know what happens behind the interface. We trust software because the interface tells us to. It is an interesting perspective, especially today as AI becomes part of our daily lives. We then moved into blockchain. Roberto was involved with decentralised systems long before blockchain became popular. In fact, when he first discovered Bitcoin, he did not immediately see its value because his focus was elsewhere. Over time, after working on multiple blockchain projects and protocols, his perspective changed. One part of his journey stood out to me. During the pandemic, he spent a significant amount of time and money building a new decentralised platform. The first attempt failed. Instead of walking away, he started again, rewriting the entire project from scratch in C, this time with the help of AI to speed up development. I think every software engineer can relate to that. Sometimes the first version teaches you more than success ever could. Towards the end of our conversation, we discussed AI. Like many engineers, I often think about the balance between the opportunities AI creates and the concentration of power behind today’s largest models. Roberto shares that concern. He believes AI is one of the most powerful tools we have ever built, but he also argues that it should become more decentralised over time. If only a handful of companies control the models, the infrastructure, and the data, they also influence how information reaches billions of people. At the same time, he is genuinely optimistic about what AI enables. He gave a simple example that stayed with me. Someone who owns a bakery understands their business far better than any software engineer ever could. Today, with AI, that bakery owner can build the first version of the software they actually need instead of trying to explain every detail to someone else. That idea extends far beyond bakeries. People closest to a problem can now participate directly in building the solution. For me, that is one of the biggest changes happening in software engineering today. This conversation is not only about blockchain or AI. It is about curiosity, questioning assumptions, learning continuously, and remembering that technology is only valuable when it genuinely helps people. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.pierrehenry.dev
