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About me

Portrait of Livio Acerbo, a man in his thirties with dark hair and black glasses, in a home office by a window overlooking the sea

I’m Livio Acerbo (Andrea Livio Acerbo on paper), a freelance developer based in Essex, England. I’ve been building for the web, front end and back end, for more than ten years, and these days I spend most of my time on AI automation for small teams.

Where I come from

I’m Italian by birth and studied at the Politecnico di Milano, where I took an MSc in Computer Science.

Since then I’ve worked across the stack: React and Node.js on the front, Python, Django and PHP on the back, Docker and AWS underneath. Software design is the part I enjoy most: deciding what a system should do, and what it should leave to people.

What that taught me

Two lessons stuck.

First: small companies lose an enormous amount of time moving data between systems by hand. Not because they’re disorganised, but because their tools were never designed to talk to each other.

Second: most automation projects fail before a single line of code is written. Nobody sits down to map how the work actually happens, with its exceptions and workarounds.

Why I went freelance

In June 2019 I went freelance, working remotely on websites, web apps and cloud deployments. When language models became good enough for real work, I started adding AI steps to classic integrations: reading invoices, classifying emails, drafting replies, summarising tickets. Always with a person approving anything that’s costly to get wrong.

Livio Acerbo mapping a process on a whiteboard with sticky notes during a small workshop

How I like to work

  • Process before tools. I don’t start with “let’s use an agent”. I start with a whiteboard.
  • Boring is good. Python, Django, Node.js, Postgres, official APIs, Docker, and no-code tools like n8n or Make when they’re the right fit.
  • Human in the loop by default. Automation should remove busywork, not accountability.
  • Everything documented. If I disappear tomorrow, your team can still run it.
  • You own it. Accounts, keys, code and data stay with you.

Outside work

I work from a home office in Essex and head into London when a workshop needs a room. At weekends I walk the coast. I read more about logistics and operations than about AI, and I think that’s why my automations tend to survive contact with reality.

You can also find me on LinkedIn, Mastodon and X.

Want to talk about a process that’s eating your week? Get in touch.