I built my first website with tables. Twenty-seven years later, I still care where every cell ends up.
1999 · <table>I'm Pier(paolo) Gorelli, an Italian developer living in Valencia. I found my first hosting on a CD-ROM inside Io Programmo, back when HTML tables were the only way to build a layout and Flash was the future. Later came the nights making our first CMS and FCKeditor behave on both Netscape and Internet Explorer: two dialects of JavaScript, no mercy. I saw floats free us from tables, built corporate sites in ASP on MS Access and raised a glass at Flash's funeral.
2004 → MilanFor more than a decade I led development in Milan, as technical director first at Siris and then at Insana: enterprise sites in Java and Oracle, medical information portals for healthcare and pharma brands, e-commerce, search engines. Always next to creatives, strategists and account managers, which is where I learned to speak agency. Patient projects also taught me to anonymise data by default. I still do, on every project, because it protects people.
2012 → freelanceAt the end of 2011 I moved to Valencia, and in 2012 I went freelance from here: websites with demanding motion, headless and classic CMS builds, web apps and hybrid mobile apps, working with agencies in Italy and Spain.
2025 → AIToday AI is part of the job. I train agency teams on tools like Claude Code, build the custom skills they're missing, and put chatbots and semantic search into their clients' products. I also say no a lot, especially when the hype is high. If a tool hasn't proved its value on real work, I don't adopt it, and I don't recommend it. What holds up ends up on the blog.
One rule above everything: I tell clients the truth, including when it's inconvenient. Trust lasts longer than any excuse.
I like it best when geometry turns into art. Once, a whole site grew out of the diagonals of a single letter.