
Alberto Granzotto
Verified Expert in Engineering
Blockchain Developer
Berlin, Germany
Toptal member since March 2, 2021
Alberto is a freelance software engineer specializing in decentralization, protocols, networking (not the one with business cards), hardware, and open source. He's been coding professionally and building software products since 2012. Alberto joined Toptal to collaborate on projects that interest him namely open-source, privacy, web, decentralization, blockchain, Ethereum, and Solidity.
Portfolio
Experience
- Software Engineering - 14 years
- Python - 14 years
- JavaScript - 10 years
- Node.js - 5 years
- Blockchain - 5 years
- Svelte - 2 years
- TypeScript - 2 years
- Solidity - 2 years
Availability
Preferred Environment
Vim Text Editor, Visual Studio Code (VS Code), Linux
The most amazing...
...thing I've built was SayDAO; the goal was to make a decentralized app that ran on Ethereum and doesn't require any prior knowledge of blockchain.
Work Experience
Senior Software Engineer
Freelance
- Developed a DAO to manage contributors' work and handle voting.
- Built an Oracle system in Go that calculates the number of tokens to release based on the value contributed to the DAO.
- Constructed a time-tracking PWA that connects to Odoo and facilitates the management of tasks.
Senior Software Engineer
Freelance
- Developed a free and open-source platform to create pop-up communities with a strong focus on privacy. It integrates with Jitsi for video calls, EtherPad for taking notes, and a forum.
- Built a custom core feature to preserve the privacy and anonymity of the participants. Identities are managed using asymmetric cryptography and the client communicates with the server using signed JSON-RPC messages.
- Built the forum from scratch and integrated web notifications.
Senior Software Engineer
Package Point
- Created a "smart locker" from scratch and had full responsibility for the hardware and software design.
- Built the circuit board for the drivers to control locks and connected everything to the GPIOs of Raspberry Pi 3.
- Developed software that could run in "kiosk mode" to control the lockers and allow the delivery and pick-up of parcels.
Senior Software Engineer
LeapDAO
- Developed demos on top of Plasma using the UTXO model instead of the classic account-model Ethereum uses.
- Contributed to the core architecture of the Plasma node.
- Participated in the decentralized decision-making process and learned a lot about how a real DAO works.
Senior Software Engineer
BigchainDB
- Contributed to the development of BigchainDB v1.0, an open-source scalable database with blockchain characteristics; built demos on top of it and managed releases.
- Drove the effort to build BigchainDB v2.0—integrating the Tendermint BFT engine, establishing benchmarks, and optimizing code.
- Proposed and maintained BigchainDB enhancement proposals (BEPs), a protocol to describe and develop new features for the product.
Senior Software Engineer
ascribe
- Developed the front-end code for Ascribe, the first platform for digital art rights management on the Bitcoin blockchain.
- Composed and optimized the back-end code from queries to execution time.
- Built a custom web crawler that could download 1.5 billion images from the web while optimizing resources and execution time.
- Constructed a high-performance reverse-search engine called image-match; it's now open source.
CEO
Urlist
- Founded and secured the investment for my startup, Urlist, a social bookmarking platform with the ultimate goal of sorting the web.
- Served as the CEO—dealing with the investors, hiring developers, leading and managing product and process, and making everything work from day one till the end.
- Developed the front-end code for the flagship product of my company.
- Built dashboards to display KPIs, constructed a platform for technical blogging, and developed other apps (also one for the now-defunct FirefoxOS).
Senior Software Engineer (2010-2012) | Software Engineer (2008-2009)
Freelance
- Developed cutting edge technology for smart street lighting that has been deployed in a highway in Italy.
- Developed a Python gateway to turn on/off the lights, dim the light intensity, collect information about the condition of the lights installed, compress and send the collected data to a remote server, and display on a screen the state of the lights.
- Integrated the software with the legacy controller provided by the client to react to emergency situations. The system was able to communicate via RS485 and XBee, using the MODBUS protocol.
- Developed a free, open-source app for the most important association for free software in Italy (2008-09). The goal was to make politicians aware of the principles behind the free software and was localized in English, Portuguese and French.
Software Engineer
Leftloft
- Worked on Pirelli's annual report and financial book.
- Developed tools to automatically port Adobe InDesign and QuarkXpress source files to web pages.
- Filled the gap between the desktop publishing tools and the web.
Java Software Developer
IKS
- Developed a framework to run benchmarks on the company's flagship product.
- Worked with legacy code and got my hands dirty with complex, layered code.
- Improved the performance of their web framework by several orders of magnitude by adding a custom cache layer to the system.
Freelance Developer
Truelite Srl
- Developed a custom CRM in TurboGears 1.x and SQLAlchemy.
- Worked with other developers on a shared codebase.
- Worked often with free and open-source code, since the company itself is developing FOSS.
Experience
SayDAO
https://github.com/vrde/saydaoIt leverages a burner wallet and OpenGSN to allow gasless transactions.
Ethnode
https://github.com/vrde/ethnodeFacebook Tracking Exposed
https://facebook.tracking.exposed/Treasure Hunt Creator | THC
https://github.com/social-dist0rtion-protocol/thcThe project challenges the misconception that "creating a good UX on Ethereum is difficult" by using an in-browser generated address (burner wallet) and gasless transactions.
An example of a game built on top of THC is Planetscape which can be found at the link below.
• https://www.dist0rtion.com/2020/01/30/Planetscape-a-dystopian-escape-game-for-36C3/
Education
Master's Degree in Computer Science
Università degli Studi di Milano-Bicocca - Milan, Italy
Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science
Università degli Studi di Padova - Padua, Italy
Skills
Libraries/APIs
Node.js, Gevent, WebExtensions API, Web API
Tools
Ethereum Plasma, Geth (go-ethereum), Vim Text Editor, Adobe InDesign, QuarkXpress, Digi XBee
Languages
JavaScript, CSS, Python, Solidity, TypeScript, Go, Bash Script, Java
Frameworks
Django, Tendermint, Svelte, TurboGears
Platforms
Amazon Web Services (AWS), Blockchain, Raspberry Pi, Ethereum, Linux, Jakarta EE, Visual Studio Code (VS Code)
Storage
MongoDB, RethinkDB, PostgreSQL, MySQL
Paradigms
Human-computer Interaction (HCI), DevOps
Other
Software Engineering, Architecture, Bitcoin, Hardware, OpenEthereum, PWA, Zero-knowledge Proofs, IPFS, Embedded Software, Modbus Protocol, RS485, Progressive Web Applications (PWAs)
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