Thank you for your interest in learning about the author of this blog. I’m Antonio Cangiano, and I’ve been writing here since 2005.
I’ll start with a disclaimer that is required by both my employer and my type of job. This is my personal blog, entirely independent of IBM. My articles and comments are my own and don’t necessarily represent my employer’s positions, strategies, or opinions.
By day I’m an Engineering Manager and AI Educator at IBM, where I lead the team behind IBM Skills Network. That’s the platform that delivers IBM’s technical education through Coursera, edX, and CognitiveClass.ai, which I co-founded and grew to 3.5 million learners. My own courses have passed 1.1 million enrollments; Generative AI: Prompt Engineering Basics alone has reached more than 669,000 of them.
I lead a team of developers, data scientists, designers, and marketers, and a good part of my week goes to the interns and early-career engineers in it. That part matters to me more than the rest of it. UBC named me Supervisor of the Year in 2024, the University of Calgary gave me a Supervisor of Merit award in 2025, and IBM has recognized my work with an Outstanding Technical Achievement Award.
I’ve made small contributions to a few books, written a column for PragPub magazine, and authored two full books myself:
- Technical Blogging, 2nd Edition (The Pragmatic Bookshelf, 2019)
- Ruby on Rails for Microsoft Developers (Wrox, 2009)
In case you were wondering, I’m Italian and I was born and raised in Italy. In 2003 I decided to leave my country, foreseeing the worsening of its economy in the years to come. I spent two and a half years in Ireland, and then I moved to Canada in 2006.
The “Zen” in the title of this blog should be intended philosophically and not religiously.
I’m very passionate about programming and AI, and I have a soft spot for mathematics as well (I used to run a math blog before I sold it). I’m mostly interested in dynamic languages, and best known for Ruby, but I also know and program in a few other languages and never stop looking at interesting developments elsewhere. My favorite web framework is Rails, but I’m not religious about it. I am a big advocate of using the right tool for the right job, and whatever makes you happy in the end.
Related interests of mine include applied mathematics, tech gadgets, entrepreneurship, blogging, and digital marketing. On a more personal level, my two main hobbies are photography and fishing. I have a tendency to collect hobbies in my limited spare time, but as I get older, I find myself gravitating towards the two mentioned above.
If you are a regular reader, or we met at one of the conferences or meetups where I was a speaker, feel free to add me to your network on LinkedIn. You can also find me on X.
My inbox is [email protected] (I trust Bayesian spam filtering). Please keep in mind that I receive many emails every day, so if the subject matter is not urgent or important, you may have to wait a while before receiving an answer, if I manage to answer at all. Don’t take it personally.
Disclosure
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