In this episode of the Elixir Mentor Podcast, I sit down with Luca Corti, CTO at Sibill, a Milano-based fintech startup building cash flow management software for Italian small and medium businesses. Luca walks through his path from the early days of the internet at a small ISP in Milano to discovering functional programming at a major Italian telco—and why Elixir clicked for him immediately after years of fighting mutable state in OOP.
Luca shares how he joined Sibill with an existing Python and TypeScript MVP, made the case for Elixir as the stack to rebuild on, and navigated integration with open banking APIs and Italy's national electronic invoicing system (SDI). We cover bank sync scheduling with Broadway and message queues, scaling a venture-backed engineering team to 40, and how fintech requirements around data privacy shape day-to-day engineering decisions.
The conversation goes deep on the BEAM's real superpower—fault tolerance and resilience over raw concurrency—and Luca's hands-on approach to learning by building: an HTTP/2 server in Elixir a decade ago, and more recently using AI to help implement an HTTP/3 library. We also discuss hiring into an Elixir codebase, the challenges of selling SaaS to Italian SMBs accustomed to on-premises software, and a grounded take on AI tooling—useful, with clear limits, and nowhere close to replacing experienced engineers.
Resources Mentioned:
- Sibill: https://sibill.com
- ankh (HTTP/2 library): https://github.com/lucacorti/ankh
- lapin (AMQP client): https://github.com/lucacorti/lapin
Connect with Luca:
- X/Twitter: https://x.com/lucacorti
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lucacorti
- GitHub: https://github.com/lucacorti
Sponsors:
- Paraxial.io: https://paraxial.io
- Jido (Elixir AI Collective Discord): https://agentjido.xyz/discord
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- Elixir Mentor: https://elixirmentor.com