Arrivederci carissimo

Building 20 in Microsoft Campus was the place of magic. I spent countless hours white boarding the future there.

One of those sessions sometime in 2008 (perhaps earlier), was with my friends Gianpaolo Carraro and Vittorio Bertocci. 2 and 1/2 Italians discussing in both English and with hands, the architecture of modern identity management in a software world that was evolving towards a services one. We were in the middle of the “X as a Service” trend.

The discussion was more of a lecture. I didn’t know it then, but I was listening to the first of many master classes by Vittorio. I remember feeling I was listening to a renaissance artist. Concepts on the whiteboard evolved naturally from the simplest to the most complex. I felt my brain working hard to keep up with the concepts, retaining a whole new vernacular: “claim“, “relying party“, “identity provider“, “federation provider”, “trust“. And so it went on for hours.

I left that session intrigued and in admiration. Intuitively, I knew that was going to be big.

The following year, I was tasked to identifying all obstacles for developing and moving apps to the cloud. Microsoft was building “Red Dog”, what eventually would become Microsoft Azure. And as I started looking into the challenges of building for this paradigm, all the semi-dormant knowledge I’ve got from Vittorio came back. Advanced identity was going to be key to unlock the cloud.

I proposed building a guide for developers covering all core scenarios for identity and access management: SSO, Federation, etc. It took quite some convincing. My bosses were not impressed. But I finally secured the approval (and the budget) and went on to make it happen.

I immediately enrolled the help of others, especially two people who would have a tremendous impact in my life: Matias and Vittorio.

The “Guide To Claims Based Identity and Access Control” was completed and published in 2009. Two years later we published a 2nd Edition, which was double the size (in pages). That signaled to me that we were dealing with a growing problem, not a shrinking one.

Vittorio did for me something no one else had ever done. He referred me for a job position in Microsoft Identity team. I interviewed and did not get the job. It was very upsetting, especially because I felt I had disappointed him.

In late 2012 I left MSFT to start Auth0 with Matias. I had dinner with Vittorio in the Thai restaurant we used to go to in Redmond. He was skeptical about our project, but wished me well. I joked he should join us. We laughed as we had done many times.

A few years later, he did join us. And made Auth0 better. We joined forces with Okta, and made it better too. And across all those years, made our whole industry better, through his generous spreading of ideas, concepts, teachings, specs, and world class presentation skills. I can hear his trademark “Buongiorno everybody!!” opening at each one of his talks.

Vittorio was always generous with his time, and deep and wide knowledge. There was not a single occasion I pinged him on Slack he would not respond. We debated amply and passionately about business, architecture, philosophy, programming, books (many books), travel, places, countries, people. I feel so grateful for all those moments.

My friend Vittorio left us yesterday. His departure leaves a big void: in our world, in our minds and in our hearts. There won’t be any of those debates anymore. But there will always be the memories, and his legacy of excellence.