The Technician Who Became a Director. Then a Media Property.
Most engineers peak at the code. Nicola Ballotta kept going. After 25 years in the internet industry, he runs four cloud engineering teams at Namecheap - one of the world's largest domain registrars - overseeing EasyWP, the managed WordPress hosting platform he built from a prototype on bare-metal hardware. But that's the day job. The other story is what happens when a self-described introvert with terrible blog history decides to write a newsletter, wakes up at 3 AM to do it, and accidentally builds a media brand.
The Hybrid Hacker launched on January 16, 2023. Eighteen months later, it had 30,000 subscribers. Then Refactoring, one of the most respected engineering leadership publications in the industry, acquired it. Together, they now reach 120,000 readers and run a 900+ member private community of tech leaders. For someone who once quipped "I've failed at writing so many blogs that failing with a newsletter won't hurt me much more," the numbers are slightly absurd.
I've failed at writing so many blogs that failing with a newsletter won't hurt me much more.
- Nicola Ballotta, on launching The Hybrid Hacker (January 2023)From Hacker Kid to Cloud Director
Nicola started following the Italian hacker scene at age 12. Not as a hobby - as a calling. By the time he was 18, he was working as a Systems Engineer for companies like Hewlett-Packard and Mondadori, Italy's largest publishing group. University happened in fits and starts - four different institutions, roughly 20 exams completed, never a degree. He was too busy building things in the real world to finish collecting credentials.
In 2008, he founded Saidmade srl, a web and mobile agency in Italy. Five years of client work, product launches, and the particular grind of running a small creative shop. He sold it. Then came wpXtreme - a US-based startup aiming to build the first integrated WordPress marketplace. It raised around $200,000 in seed funding. It also failed. Nicola doesn't hide this. He catalogs it with the same systematic clarity he applies to cloud architecture: here's what happened, here's what it taught me, here's what came next.
What came next was a phone call. A contact in his network was looking for someone to help build a managed WordPress hosting product. Instead of recommending a name, Nicola proposed himself. Two interviews and a test project later, he was at Namecheap. He built EasyWP - a Kubernetes-based managed WordPress platform running on bare-metal infrastructure, kept affordable by avoiding the public cloud markup. It grew from zero to thousands of customers. He grew from Product Owner to Engineering Manager to Director of Cloud, leading four teams that run Namecheap's private and public cloud, CI/CD pipelines, and GitOps infrastructure.
The 3-3-3 Anti-Burnout Rule
Completely disconnect from work. No Slack, no email, no code reviews.
Rest, reflect, and self-assess. Let the brain decompress at a longer cadence.
Full breaks to maintain the discipline and consistency that make the other 49 weeks sustainable.
How a 3 AM Alarm Built a Media Brand
The Hybrid Hacker wasn't built in prime time. It was built in the gap between midnight and the rest of the world waking up. Nicola held a full-time Director role, had two children, and wanted to write weekly. His solution: wake up at 3 AM, write while the house was quiet, hit publish every Thursday without exception. He eliminated side projects. He cut Netflix. He produced 100+ custom visuals for his articles, a deliberately anti-AI move that made his newsletter visually distinct from every template-heavy Substack in the engineering leadership space.
He also used AI - ChatGPT - to proofread his work. English is not his native language, and he's transparent about that. The combination of handcrafted illustrations and AI proofreading is very on-brand for someone who calls himself a "Hybrid Hacker."
His original subscriber goal for 2023 was 1,000. He ended the year at approximately 15,000. By the time he handed off to Refactoring in June 2024, the newsletter had ~30,000 subscribers and $6,000+ in annual recurring revenue - a figure that significantly understates the actual cost, which he calculated at roughly $4,000 per month in opportunity cost. The math was not the point. The audience was.
Daddy, can you play with me, or do you have to write the newsletter?
- Nicola Ballotta's daughter. The sentence that triggered the Refactoring acquisition.An Acquisition Triggered by a Child's Question
On June 5, 2024, The Hybrid Hacker was acquired by Refactoring, the engineering leadership newsletter run by Luca Rossi. The announcement called it "a collaboration." The real story is more interesting.
Luca Rossi had been publicly supportive of Nicola's work despite running what any investor deck would label a "competitor." When Nicola began looking for ways to reduce the solo writing burden - motivated specifically by his daughter asking whether he had to write the newsletter instead of playing with her - he didn't go to the market. He went to the person who had already demonstrated that they understood what he was building.
The Hybrid Hacker was Refactoring's first-ever acquisition. The combined publication reached 120,000+ subscribers by August 2024. The private community for tech leaders crossed 900 members. Nicola shifted from sole author running a treadmill to part-time contributor with space to think. The deal was not just a transaction - it was a values-aligned exit that preserved the thing he'd built while giving him back time for the people who mattered more.
What He Actually Writes About
The Hybrid Hacker covers the territory between "still writing code" and "running engineering organizations." That space where the job title says Director but the brain still thinks in systems. Nicola writes from both sides - the technical and the human. His most-read pieces include frameworks for engineering management, career retrospectives, and practical guides on topics that most leadership publications treat as purely soft.
His Good Engineering Manager Formula: 30% Align + 20% Mentor + 10% Code + a non-negotiable layer of what he calls "being human" - empathy, compassion, emotional intelligence. Not motivational poster language. Operational instruction for people who find themselves managing other engineers and have no idea how they got there or what they're supposed to do now.
He is, as he says, "ultimately a technician at heart." He still contributes to open-source projects. Namecheap's Cloud team open-sourced the MayFly Kubernetes operator under his watch. His GitHub has 16 repositories. At home, he builds things with Arduino, Raspberry Pi, 3D printers, and mechanical keyboards. He cooks. He tinkers. He has 15+ years of remote work experience and has never needed a commute to stay sharp.