Summary
AI Joshua
Luca Rodino joins the “Seriously, bud” podcast and talks about taking up saxophone two years ago with no prior music background, motivated by a lifelong love of jazz and blues. He describes being initially afraid to start something from scratch, then buying a saxophone on impulse, learning to read music, and practicing about an hour a day. Because the instrument is loud, he can’t practice at home and instead plays at his gym in an industrial area, often using background music so it feels like playing with a band.
He shares personal background from northern Italy, living about 15 minutes outside Milan and about 1.5 hours from the Alps for skiing. He says he prefers living outside the city due to traffic and pollution and describes his surroundings as more rural, with a house and horses nearby. Born in Milan, he explains his parents moved there for work and met while working in Italian broadcasting, including RAI, and he mentions having a younger sister and four nieces, though they are not extremely close due to different life paths.
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Luca discusses language learning, noting he started with French as a child because there was no English teacher in his town, later learning English as a teenager and studying Spanish at university, though he now mainly uses Italian and English. He works for SiteGround, based in Sofia, Bulgaria, and recalls spending six months there when he joined nine years ago, learning basic Bulgarian words and reading signs. He also confirms he plans to attend WordCamp Europe in Poland and says he has not missed a WordCamp Europe since 2018, serving this year as lead of the communication team with a colleague.
Reflecting on school, Luca says he was a good student early on but struggled as a teenager, which led his father to send him to a priest college for five years—an experience he credits with helping him mature and improve academically, including in English. Afterward, he studied marketing and statistics at university while working at a small startup that grew and was eventually acquired by Ernst & Young. He later joined SiteGround to build the Italian market, describing growth into a top 10 web hosting provider in Italy, and since 2022 he has expanded into managing global partnerships, including brand collaborations and service integrations; he explains web hosting as providing and managing the server infrastructure needed to keep websites online.
Luca talks about his long-term relationship of around 13 – 14 years, saying they knew each other from their small town and connected more through skiing trips in the Alps. They moved in together years ago, bought a new house two years ago, and are planning to have children in the next couple of years, though he is hesitant about marriage due to his experience with his parents’ divorce and the difficulty of divorce in Italy. He mentions frequent work travel, his partner’s engineering work on energy-generating wind-driven treadmill/turbine-type systems, and their shared love of food, with him training at the gym and boxing (no longer doing serious fights due to work). He names New York as his favorite U.S. city, highlights Bryce Canyon as a memorable park experience, and recommends his friend Laura Sacco (a longtime WordPress community figure) as a future guest