The pivot I’m taking over the next eighteen months is going to look like a sharper turn from the outside than it feels from the inside — and honestly, anyone who’s talked to me for more than 45 seconds already knew this was coming.
Today, I’m wrapping up five years at Heroku, and thirteen years total in software engineering. In September, I’m starting a two-year master’s degree in sustainable urban mobility; first in Lisbon, then in Barcelona.
How this started
I grew up outside Detroit, a place built almost entirely around the car, with very little to fall back on if you don’t have one. We didn’t travel to other cities much growing up, so it was an easy assumption as a child that this is just how the world looked: stand-alone houses separated by large roads and highways. Still, I was fascinated by it — at six years old I had an extremely strong sense of direction and spent a lot of time studying maps, looking out the window at passing scenery, and figuring out what roads and highways connected to which places and people.
At seventeen, I got on a plane for the first time. The European cities I got to explore were so vastly different from where I grew up — places where walking, transit, and dense urban living were the default rather than the exception. Traveling through my twenties kept extending the list of places that fascinated me — from Chicago to London and Tokyo, among many others — and every city added another data point to a concept I couldn’t quite name. What I realized with time was that the way a city moves people determines, in concrete and often unflattering ways, who has access to what — work, health, family, and public life.
Cars are a marvel of engineering, but I also remember the sheer panic my father (and a teenage version of me) dealt with when the car wouldn’t start. Without a friend or family member to give you a ride, you were stuck. You weren’t going to work. You weren’t going to the grocery store. You weren’t going to that appointment. An absence of options is the worst kind of option in itself, chosen on your behalf.
Life in my first walkable city
At twenty-three I moved to Chicago. I sold my car. Contrary to my upbringing where cars were equated with freedom, what I realized over years was that this felt more free. My life wasn’t restricted; it opened up. I was more connected to my city, my neighborhood.
I biked as many square miles of that city as I could. I took every ‘L’ line, getting off in random neighborhoods to just walk and explore. The buses unlocked new corners of the city. Even the Chicago suburbs, as car-dependent as they are, had Metra and cute main streets near those trains. It’s hard to put into words how much I enjoyed that early exploration, and how it has continued to this day.
Early advocacy and projects
I was working as a software engineer and eventually learned of ChiHackNight. It was an incredible space to meet people who cared about making their city better, where folks strived to use technology for civic good. I spent some time there on a small personal project making it easier for Ruby developers to utilize the Chicago Transit Authority’s real-time customer alerts tracking API. It ended up teaching me as much about institutional decisions as it did about data formats — the XML payloads and manually updated GTFS feeds were a window into how a public agency moves, what it prioritizes, and how long legacy decisions tend to stick around.
After moving to New York in 2019, I got involved with Riders Alliance and Transportation Alternatives — showing up to meetings, hearing from advocates and politicians, and starting to understand how change in this space actually gets made. My reading shifted toward land use, housing, climate adaptation, and transit-oriented development. Over time, the threads kept multiplying and connecting, and at some point mobility stopped being a side interest and became the lens I saw everything else through.
Why a pivot, not a side project
Software engineering has been good to me, and the skills it builds travel — most of the work in mobility is, in the end, multi-stakeholder, long-horizon, institutionally entangled work. But after thirteen years, I realized I wanted to work on problems I’m deeply passionate about — not just find them technically interesting, but care about the outcomes. Mobility has been that thing for a long time.
There’s a difference between a thing you find interesting on weekends and a thing you’d reorganize a decade around. The ratio has been quietly inverting for years.
The hard problems in mobility, such as equitable access, climate adaptation, and the relationship between land use, housing, and transit, don’t only get solved by better tooling and technology. It takes policy, governance, and planning frameworks I haven’t been formally trained in. That’s the gap I want to close, and it’s why going back to school was the only move that made sense.
Why now
The EIT Urban Mobility Master School’s SUMT track turned out to be the most precise match I’ve found for what I actually want to learn — not only transport planning and urban data analysis, but the connective tissue between policy, infrastructure, and the institutions that decide which interventions are even on the table. Studying and living in two different cities to work on challenge-driven projects with government and industry partners brings me much closer to how mobility transitions actually happen.
There’s also a more personal piece. My wife literally put urban density commitments in her wedding vows: promising that we’ll always live near bike lanes, take the Metro over a rideshare (most of the time), and a sworn moratorium on suburban sprawl. She coined “MattTA,” her name for me as a one-man transit authority, which tells you something about how often I bring this up. We’ve wanted to live in Europe for a long time. As a dual Italian-US citizen I’ve always had one foot pointed across the Atlantic; this is my first opportunity to plant both down on the other side. We’ll be in Lisbon by the end of summer.
What’s next
This blog is where I’ll dig into the smaller pieces of my new adventure — what I’m reading, what I’m noticing in the cities I’m in, what I get wrong, and how my engineering instincts hold up in a field where the “customer” is everyone and no one at once, and where the constraints — budgets, shifting priorities, political cycles — rhyme with what I know but play by different rules.
If any of that’s interesting to you, I’m glad you’re here.