My name is Franco, i am a developer born and currently living in Argentina.

i am a founding member at darkroom.engineering, a small team of people building a new kind of studio, our goal is to change how we see work. we are based on some interesting principles i've acquired through the years, hope some of them transpire from this couple paragraphs, i don't want to be explicit (being honest i'm kind of tired of explaining it, iykyk) considering there is no rush, i mean you are already reading an about page from a dev on the other side of the planet, meaning you wanted to read a story... so let's take a couple steps back and start from the beginning, I've been around the internet since screens had to wear protection, i've done a couple of talks on the things i'm passionate about. I've worked at huge software factories, then moved on to a smaller agency until i learned enough and thought of building my own place, with all the good things and none of the bad, lol.

that was basement.studio (you may be familiar with them, they've done great stuff while i was there and after i left as well) we had tons of fun and even attended a lot of conferences to meet people we admired from the industry, which lead to dream about speaking at one, maybe one day.

after a couple of years hustling and in the worst part of the pandemic, i had my first child, and a lot was groing through my head, work was important but i wanted to be able to delegate more, and take more care of my family,i got tempted to join Studio Freight as a partner and technical director (you may know them by the work they've done before me, while i was there and after i left). Sharing the weight with three more partners, and focusing on building the Dev wing only. I had the chance to restart and apply all the things i had learned on a blank canvas. I got to work really quick on a lot of fun stuff, eCommerce for youtubers, NFL stars and even Blockbuster movies, met a lot of amazing human beings and had fun growing that knowing it was one step closer to the dream, a team that shares a passion to which each member can bring their whole selves, not just their skills.

the work we did and the fun we had led us to build some sort of trust i haven't seen in a while, which, in fact, did affect the work, we felt safe to share ideas and rough concepts, and just try shit. all this fun and games made us question everything and always keep a naive mindset about the technologies and tools we were using, no matter how pro we were already.

this was the perfect environment to do opensource projects, Lenis being the most successful out of the bunch (for now), and it was via this success that we finally got invited to an Awwwards conference in Amsterdam, but this time as speakers. it was an amazing experience, representing Studio Freight abroad and meeting IRL with the whole dev team.

year over year we kept being invited, and had the opportunity to talk about how we do things, share more about our tools, our philosophy, the last time (for now) was Valencia '24, and it was the first that we were representing a different studio, i'll go into it in the next paragraph. We cared so much about our freedom, our way of doing things, and Open Source in general, that we wanted to try experimental stuff to keep doing that. Find ways to monetize it, and be able to share more without having so many filters. so we decided it was best for the dev team to branch out, there's no bad blood between the studios, in fact we love each other and continue to work together on a lot of projects, but we also thought it was time for Studio Freight Darkroom's potential to be widely available for other design studios and freelancers.

so just like that, and after 3 years we decided it was best to branch out, darkroom.engineering was born on Valentine's Day 2024

if you want to check some crazy work we've done, go to darkroom.engineering's website, where things get developed.