Peter Giacomo Lombardo

Creator of Password Pusher. Founder & Principle of Apnotic. OSS Developer & former staff of acquired startups Instana & Tracelytics.

I’m the founder and principal of Apnotic, a bootstrapped company that builds Password Pusher — a platform thousands of organizations use to distribute passwords, files, and other sensitive information without leaving a permanent trail in email, Slack, or chat.

I live in Palermo, Sicily. Before Apnotic I spent years building performance instrumentation at startups that got acquired (Instana → IBM, Tracelytics → AppNeta). I still maintain HiveMQtt, the official C# MQTT and Sparkplug client for .NET, and Awesome MQTT.

Apnotic

Apnotic — Secure flow. Total control.

Apnotic, LLC is a privately held, zero-debt US company I founded in 2024 to own and grow Password Pusher — the open source project, the public service, the docs, and the Pro products around it.

apnotic.com pwpush.com docs GitHub

Password Pusher started with a git commit on December 28, 2011. pwpush.com went live shortly after. The idea has not changed much: you get a unique URL that expires after a set number of views, a set amount of time, or both — then the secret is gone. No leftover copy in an email archive for someone to find years later.

What has changed is the product around that idea. Teams can push text, files, URLs, and QR codes; request secrets back from customers with a one-time upload link; lock a push with a passphrase; and see a full audit trail of who retrieved what and when. Hosted in the US and EU, or self-hosted if the data has to stay on your infrastructure. Pro subscriptions fund the open source edition.

We’re a small team. I run the company; Joe Parisi handles sales and support; Hasan Özovalı is lead fullstack. No venture capital, so we build for customers rather than a fundraise.

Open Source

I contribute to a large number of open source projects. See the Projects page or my GitHub profile for more.

The ones I spend the most time on:

  • Password Pusher — secure, self-destructing links for sensitive data. Hosted at pwpush.com since 2011.
  • HiveMQtt — the official MQTT 5.0 and Sparkplug client for C# / .NET.
  • Awesome MQTT — a curated list of MQTT brokers, clients, tools, and resources.

Earlier: distributed tracing

I built performance instrumentation for Instana (and previously Tracelytics) that traces requests across processes, hosts, clouds, and serverless — key metrics plus the execution path as data moves through a distributed stack.

Ruby Distributed Tracing

My focus was Python and Ruby, with similar work in Go and Node.js.

I wrote a brief history of Instana from the engineering side, mostly so that part of the story does not disappear.

Published Articles

Article Originally Posted At
Streaming Sensor Data to an Edge AI Model over MQTT with C# HiveMQ Blog
The Ultimate Guide on How to Use MQTT with Node.js HiveMQ Blog
HiveMQ MQTT Client for C# / .NET HiveMQ Blog
Zero-Effort, Fully Automatic Distributed Tracing for Python Instana Blog
Instrumenting Ruby on Rails with TraceView in Under 10 Minutes DZone

After IBM acquired Instana they removed most of the pre-acquisition blog. The Instana piece above is archived here.

Other Interests

Work

Current

Company Area Work Done
Apnotic Secure information distribution Founder & Principal. Password Pusher — hosted SaaS, self-hosted Pro, and the open source project.

Past

Company Area Work Done
HiveMQ MQTT / IoT Staff Software Engineer (2022–2024). Built HiveMQtt, the official C# MQTT and Sparkplug client for .NET. Still maintained.
Instana Performance instrumentation Distributed tracing and metrics for Ruby, Python, Go & Node.js, plus a bit of magic.
Tracelytics Performance instrumentation Built a Ruby instrumentation gem covering 9 Ruby versions, 6 frameworks, and 14 libraries.
EMC Distributed filesystems Built a Multi-Path Filesystem for HPC environments.
AgentCourt Genomic services Built systems to support gene sequencing machines.