Hello World: Why This Site Exists

Welcome. This is the first post on my personal site, and a good place to say what this site is actually for.

I'm Nunzio Alexandro Letizia, CTO and co-founder of PiktID, a researcher with a PhD in Communications Engineering, and a long-time fan of problem-solving in any form.

This site is meant to be a small archive of who I am and what I've done. Some of it is already here: my work at PiktID, the research from my PhD, math problems I've collected over the years, the basics of how to reach me. The plan is to keep adding to it over time. Stories, photos from places I've been, ideas I want to test out, side projects, papers I've read, the small things that don't really fit anywhere else. A single place I can come back to, expand, and revise as I learn more.

Why now

Honestly, because of agents.

For most of the last decade, keeping a personal site current felt like a side quest I never had time for. Writing a post took hours, designing a page felt like its own project, keeping the layout consistent across pages was a constant tax. The friction outweighed the desire, so the site stayed thin.

That has shifted. With capable coding agents I can describe what I want and iterate quickly. Refactor a layout, generate banner images, migrate the blog pipeline, draft a section. Work that used to take an evening now takes a conversation. Most of the structural choices on this site, including the design system, the icon system, the image pipeline, and the banners, were arrived at by talking through tradeoffs with an agent and then committing the result. That removes the main reason the site stayed quiet, so I plan to populate it more often. Not in long flurries, but in small, regular updates.

What you'll find here

A few rough buckets, with no fixed schedule:

• About. Who I am, where I've worked, where I've studied. The long-form, slow-changing version of a CV.
• Work. What I'm building right now at PiktID. Today that's Studio and On-Model.
• Research. Selected publications, awards, the academic side of things.
• Blog. Posts on AI and GenAI engineering, research notes, math problems, founder reflections, and the occasional meta post on tooling.
• Hobbies. Asphalt, running and Math olympiad problems I've created and solved over the years, plus the rest of life outside work.

Why a personal site

Two reasons.

First, writing forces me to actually finish a thought. I tend to collect half-formed ideas in notebooks and never test them against an audience. Publishing breaks that loop.

Second, I want a single place that reflects who I am. Not a CV, not a LinkedIn profile, not a tweet, but the long-form, slow-changing version. Something I can come back to and edit as I learn more.

If you've made it this far, thank you. Feel free to get in touch with topic suggestions, corrections, or just to say hi.