A year of Reggio Emilia Full Stack: Reggio’s web development restarts with a beer
What is the city community that combines development and networking, and how did it come about?'
By Niccolò maria Menozzi
Today marks one year since the first meeting of the Reggio Emilia Full Stack community, and we want to share a little bit of the behind-the-scenes history of this growing group.
Reggio Emilia Full Stack officially began on October 29, 2024. The series of events kicked off with the first evening at the Catomes Tôt social club in Reggio. After that “pilot” evening, the event moved elsewhere, but it never stopped.A year later, we held a dozen meetings with an average of 26 participants per evening.
Let’s find out what it is and what has happened in recent months.
What is Reggio Emilia Full Stack?
It is a community for technology enthusiasts who meet regularly to network and share their passion and curiosity for cutting-edge topics. Software development, web, SysAdmin, AI…
Every month, the informal meeting is held on Tuesdays at the Divina Commedia Pub Osteria in Reggio Emilia. The meetings are free and begin with one or two short technical talks, followed by a beer with friends. A microphone, a few slides, and little else. From the outset, the goal was to test an unpretentious formula, creating a group of friends.
The focus of the evenings is ondialogue between people and cultivating a social dimension in the physical world. Whether this eventually translates into collaborations in the digital world of work is not necessary, but it is certainly a welcome “side effect”.
Our CTO Paolo Caleffi is the promoter of this community and has been at the forefront of organizing the evenings, supported by Davide Muzzarelli of WebForce Srl and Emanuele Caruso. To their friends, Muz and Carru, we will talk about the former very soon.
For now, if you want to stay up to date on the community’s activities, you can follow the LinkedIn page or, better yet, the Meetup page.
The themes of Reggio Emilia Full Stack
The community is open to everyone’s suggestions, and there is room for both technical topics and others with a more ethical-philosophical flavor. In recent months, we have touched on niche topics and others that are currently trending, such as artificial intelligence.
Broadly speaking, here is the list of topics we covered together:
- Business code vs clean code
- Software security (authorization, authentication, OAuth2, JWT, etc.)
- Supply chain attacks, dependencies, and vulnerabilities
- AI and junior developers
- AI and neuroscience
- Game development, high performance networking and cloud
- AWS, Azure and serverless
- CSS and accessibility
- Employees vs freelancers
There were also a few evenings without talks, entirely dedicated to interaction between participants, to strengthen the community.
How Reggio Emilia Full Stack came about
It all started with Modena Full Stack, the community created in 2014 by our friend Davide. An initiative that is now more than ten years old, but which only found its “official” dimension in 2019. Paolo discovered the community in February 2020, but it took some time to get going. In February 2023, Davide contacted him to get to know him and ask him to participate as a speaker.
On May 18, Paolo gave his talk in Modena, and thanks to this opportunity, we were able to get to know Davide better. Calling him a computer scientist is an understatement; he is more like a volcano of ideas who never ceases to amaze us with his energy and contagious enthusiasm.
When the opportunity arose, we invited Davide to our first company barbecue. He told us about his experiences abroad, Silicon Valley, and his desire to bring the excitement of major international development events to Emilia Romagna. He always talks about it with a sparkle in his eyes, and his recent achievements with DevFest Modena 2025 (an exceptional event dedicated to developers) are demonstrating his determination and ability to bring people together.
Between a spicy chicken wing and a bite of pulled pork bun, we began to talk more concretely about the possibility of exporting Full Stack to Reggio as well. Davide knows how to be very engaging and whetted our appetite — as if the BBQ wasn’t enough. Almost since the dawn of Dreamonkey, our partners have been dreaming of a digital Renaissance in Reggio, and seeing Davide’s enthusiasm gave us the impetus to decide to get busy. Less planning and more action, and the rest would follow.
Of course, at the moment, Renaissance sounds a bit grandiose, and Full Stack is still a small, growing community. But you have to start somewhere, and this is just one of the initiatives that Dreamonkey is supporting in an effort to boost the software industry in Emilia Romagna. Something bigger is brewing in Modena, and we are happy to have contributed.
The Modena DevFest and the Full Stack logo
In September 2024, we made a small contribution to the DevFest Modena event, held at the Laboratorio Aperto di Modena on October 12. Like every DevFest, it was sponsored by Google, while Davide coordinated the Modena event. On that occasion, we helped set up the event website following some of Google’s official guidelines.
The DevFest website was another opportunity to get closer. As soon as the project was finalized, we moved back to Full Stack, with the intention of revamping the icon that had unofficially identified the event previously. We wanted something quick to implement but effective. No complicated brand studies. Just a more professional logo to start giving the community a face.
At the end of September, brainstorming began, and Niccolò Menozzi (writing this article) together with Davide and others created the logos for the two sister communities.
It was a short journey, attempting to combine an informal tone with elements related to the world of coding, without falling into a* *look-and-feel that was too playful.
The future of Reggio Emilia Full Stack
What will become of this community? We hope that it will grow healthily and strongly, expanding its sphere of influence and attracting more and more people.
We are also looking for new sponsors to help grow the initiative. The first round of beer for these thirsty developers certainly won’t pay for itself! If your company is interested in supporting the community, please contact us.
If you want to stay up to date, follow our LinkedIn page or Meetup page. Better still, come along to one of our evenings and get to know us (admission is free)!