Fabio Cicerchia, Developer in Rome, Metropolitan City of Rome, Italy
Fabio is available for hire
Hire Fabio

Fabio Cicerchia

Verified Expert  in Engineering

Software Developer

Location
Rome, Metropolitan City of Rome, Italy
Toptal Member Since
October 29, 2021

Fabio is a passionate engineer and engineering manager with almost two decades of expertise in optimizing architecture and infrastructure (containers and VMs), as well as processes (pipelines and deployments). He mainly takes out all the waste in the development processes by simply doing three things: automation, optimization, and continuous refactoring. Fabio brings value to the company by helping engineering teams deliver value faster with higher standards.

Portfolio

Treatwell
Team Leadership, Kanban, Jira, Line Management, Learning & Development...
Treatwell
Amazon EKS, Docker, Terraform, Ansible, GitLab CI/CD, Linux, Containerization...
Radical
Amazon Web Services (AWS), Domain-driven Design (DDD), Docker, Go, Kanban...

Experience

Availability

Full-time

Preferred Environment

Amazon Web Services (AWS), Infrastructure as Code (IaC), Go, PHP, CI/CD Pipelines, Docker, Containers, Kubernetes

The most amazing...

...thing was cutting down IT expenses while reducing time to market (TTM) of the development flow by simplifying the overall architecture.

Work Experience

Engineering Manager

2022 - PRESENT
Treatwell
  • Focused on multiple tracks and initiatives, such as line management, product ownership and management, direct contributions, cross-team relationships, process optimizations with agile coaches), and roadmap definition and evolution.
  • Strove to remove bottlenecks for the team, improved the existing processes and methodologies in the team, and introduced a few new initiatives.
  • Supported a migration from a mixed bare-metal/cloud solution to 100% cloud on AWS and supported the cost optimization phase after the AWS migration was completed.
Technologies: Team Leadership, Kanban, Jira, Line Management, Learning & Development, Sprint Retrospectives, Best Practices, IT Product Management, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Cloud, Cost Reduction & Optimization, Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), Backlog Management

Platform Engineer

2022 - 2023
Treatwell
  • Advocated for DevOps and developer experience practices and led and moderated the internal DevOps guild sessions.
  • Introduced Terraform in the platform's toolbox and extended its usage to the engineering teams.
  • Improved the EKS tools and reduced the complexity of existing processes to simplify the migrations/upgrades of production clusters.
Technologies: Amazon EKS, Docker, Terraform, Ansible, GitLab CI/CD, Linux, Containerization, Containers, Orchestration, Provisioning Tools, Infrastructure as Code (IaC), Amazon Web Services (AWS), Cloud, Kubernetes, DevOps, Cost Reduction & Optimization

Senior Software/Cloud Engineer

2020 - 2022
Radical
  • Improved the overall AWS infrastructure, introduced CloudFormation and Terraform, and increased security with the dedicated audit.
  • Reduced the lead time by working on a CI/CD pipeline for an efficient development process. Also, halved the average pipeline running time.
  • Implemented cost monitoring, observability, and alerting practices.
  • Cut down expenses by 50% on development and pre-production servers.
Technologies: Amazon Web Services (AWS), Domain-driven Design (DDD), Docker, Go, Kanban, Microservices, PHP, GitLab, GitLab CI/CD, Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS), Amazon Elastic Container Registry (ECR), Amazon EC2, Amazon CloudFront CDN, AWS ELB, Amazon QuickSight, Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS), Amazon Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS), Amazon S3 (AWS S3), Amazon Route 53, Terraform, Terragrunt, AWS CloudFormation, Microservices Architecture, Containers, Infrastructure as Code (IaC), DevOps, Cloud, Cost Reduction & Optimization, SQL

Technical Project Manager

2018 - 2020
Skuola.net
  • Managed the interactions across teams by facilitating different phases like requirement analysis, epic and story planning, estimation and forecasting, execution, delivery, and follow-up.
  • Introduced several approaches and methodologies such as standup meetings and retrospectives, including internal and cross-team, Gantt and burn-down charts, and issue tracking system (Jira).
  • Used several approaches and methodologies, including a support tracking system, deployment summaries, kanban boards, planning poker, no estimates (not fully adopted), and team capacity planning.
Technologies: Jira, Scrum, Kanban, Sprint Retrospectives, Agile, Gantt Chart, Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), Objectives & Key Results (OKRs), Backlog Management, Proof of Concept (POC), Team Management, IT Project Management, Cost Reduction & Optimization

Chief Technology Officer

2016 - 2020
Skuola.net
  • Worked on new strategies to improve the quality of the technical projects and make the internal process leaner in order to support the business needs by delivering frequently and keeping the quality at high standards.
  • Hired and managed a mixed team of remote and an in-house team of seven people.
  • Managed the IT budget and cut down the IT costs by 30%.
  • Migrated to Jira to create a more structured process and implement a lightweight Scrum approach.
  • Scaled up the infrastructure and halved the web servers' load by using efficient caching.
  • Implemented infrastructure as code (IaC) to manage 80+ servers, reducing maintenance time by around 80%.
  • Increased the Joel Test (12 Steps) score from 7 to 10.
  • Increased the reliability of the existing architecture by upgrading the tech stack and adding a secondary datacenter in a different region and application telemetry systems.
  • Implemented a continuous integration and deployment system.
Technologies: Scrum, Kanban, XP, Proxmox, PHP, CI/CD Pipelines, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Ansible, Galera Cluster, Jira Administration, MariaDB, Redis, Terraform, Varnish, React Native, Apache2, Amazon EC2, AWS Polly, Amazon S3 (AWS S3), Elasticsearch, GitLab, MaxScale, Packer, NGINX, Percona, Containers, VM, Virtual Machines, Virtualization, Cloud, Infrastructure as Code (IaC), Linux Administration, SQL

Startup Managing Director

2015 - 2017
Kodebeat
  • Took care of all the product aspects, from the IT architecture to the planning and implementation of marketing and sales strategies.
  • Worked on the scouting process of providers, clients, and partners, relationship and budget management, and hiring process in several areas.
  • Managed a team of three people directly, including a content specialist, sales specialist, and marketing specialist.
Technologies: Google AdWords, MariaDB, Mixpanel, NGINX, PHP 7, RabbitMQ, Redis, Symfony 3, Capistrano, Mandrill

Senior Developer

2015 - 2016
Immobiliare.it
  • Learned the internal processes and technology stack of Immobiliare.it in order to replicate it to LuxuryEstate.com.
  • Mentored a team of six people who were working on the project.
  • Managed to work on a restyle of the UI and wrote from scratch the whole codebase; the whole team managed to learn new approaches and technologies.
Technologies: Code Review, Kanban, Apache Thrift, Capistrano, GitLab, Grunt, PHP 7, Symfony 3, Webpack, HHVM, XHProf

Senior Developer

2013 - 2015
iovox
  • Introduced unit testing and code coverage methodologies.
  • Trained several new hires during the onboarding process.
  • Worked on a whole architectural redesign of an analytics and reporting dashboard.
Technologies: Agile, AngularJS, Apache2, Bash, Jenkins, Jira, MariaDB, MongoDB, PhalconPHP, PHP, PHPUnit, Selenium, Unit Testing, Zend Framework, SQL, NoSQL

LAMP/PHP Developer

2012 - 2013
FusePump
  • Worked in a team to develop a cutting-edge real-time statistic system.
  • Became the lead developer of the real-time statistic system project.
  • Worked on technical project management, product planning, and code development.
Technologies: Agile, Apache2, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Bash, Jasmine, Jira, MongoDB, MySQL, Redis, PHP, PHPUnit, Scrum, Unit Testing, XHProf, SQL, NoSQL

Web Developer | Lead Developer

2010 - 2012
DNSEE
  • Acted as lead developer on a big project, reporting directly to the CTO.
  • Worked on technical project management, customer relationships, internal and external training, and code development.
  • Managed a cross-functional team of three developers, one art director, one system administrator, one account, and one QA.
Technologies: Agile, Apache2, Hudson, Jira, Joomla, MySQL, PHP, Selenium, Symfony 1, Unit Testing, XP, SQL

Web Developer

2008 - 2010
Populis
  • Worked on the development, from scratch, on the front-end side of a user management system integrated into all the websites in the Excite network and deployed in six different countries, including the UK, Germany, Spain, France, Netherlands, and Italy.
  • Managed the channels—video, bynight, mix, and blog of excite.
  • Maintained the sites of Excite Europe Network, the Network NanoPublishing, and corporate sites.
  • Worked on and maintained a system for tracking ROI, based on incoming tracking events, such as clicks, sales, and impressions.
Technologies: Functional Testing, CSS, HTML, JavaScript, Joomla, MySQL, PHP, PostgreSQL, Python, Selenium, WordPress, Zend Framework

Web and Software Developer

2007 - 2007
ADQ
  • Managed and maintained a core product, an eCommerce website StockInformatica (http://www.stockinformatica.com).
  • Maintained and managed a core product, an online traveling community ItalianCamper (http://www.italiancamper.com).
  • Reported directly to CTO since I was working directly on two core products.
Technologies: Microsoft Access, Active Server Pages (ASP), CSS, HTML, IIS, JavaScript, MySQL, osCommerce, PHP, Visual Basic 6 (VB6), WordPress

10x Software Engineer Academy

10x Software Engineer Learning Path is an online course with a curated list of excellent content, including articles, videos, books, exercises, tips, and suggestions collected over the years as a software engineer, from junior developer position up to CTO.

I created this learning path, which started as a simple GitHub repository and became an ebook and an online course. It helps developers become better at their craft by providing significant resources to strengthen the knowledge about several topics, including front end, back end, system administrator, DevOps, Agile, project management, and many more.

Go Proxy Cache

https://github.com/fabiocicerchia/go-proxy-cache
Go Proxy Cache is a simple reverse proxy with Caching, written in Go, using Redis.

The main features are the following:
- Full-page caching, via Redis.
- Cache invalidation and cache bypass
- ETag support
- Cache Stampede Prevention & Serving Stale Content
- HTTP(S) Load Balancing, multiple algorithms available
- HTTP/2 support
- SSL/TLS certificates, via ACME or own SSL/TLS certificates
- Healthcheck endpoint
- Cache Circuit Breaker
- HTTP to HTTPS redirects
- GZIP compression
- Server timeouts
- OpenTelemetry tracing
- Prometheus endpoint
- Support for Sentry and Syslog

The primary usage of this tool is to speed up any website by caching and serving static content. It acts as a reverse proxy and can save the extra load from the back-end servers.

Docker Image Nginx and Lua

https://hub.docker.com/r/fabiocicerchia/nginx-lua
This project was born because there was a need to have the latest Nginx version available with Lua support; OpenResty does it ideally; unfortunately, the release process is not as fast as one would desire.

I managed to automate the build process of those docker images as soon as a new Nginx version is released or an OS distro update is released. In this way, I managed to provide Nginx with Lua support on each new version.

Nginx 1.19 and Docker image with Lua support based on Alpine Linux, Amazon Linux, Fedora, and Ubuntu. The main features are:
- Support for Lua.
- Minimal size only, minimal layers
- The same build configure of the official Nginx image
- Security checks: Docker Bench for Security, Snyk
- Docker health checks
- Exposes default ports (80 and 443), easy to extend
- Support for multiple Linux distros: Alpine, Amazon, Debian, Fedora, and Ubuntu
- Extra Lua modules
- Performance benchmarks
- LuaRocks support.

Badge Poser

https://poser.pugx.org/
Badge Poser is an open-source tool for generating PHP badges that renders some badges for your readme with the Packagist information.

It uses Shields for packagist.org repository that shows how many times your project has been downloaded from packagist.org or its latest stable version.

At the moment, I'm the sole infrastructure maintainer on AWS.

DXpertise

DXpertise is an IT training course aggregation platform that allows developers to find the best courses available on the market.

The platform is made by developers for developers with the aim to increase the knowledge level of each one of us to make the whole industry better, more challenging, qualified, satisfying, and fun.

San Raffaele

https://sanraffaele.it/
Development and project management of a multilanguage web portal for a big Italian healthcare company.

The portal ranges from a CMS to health structure management through profiled user registration, booking, contact, and form to ask questions directly to doctors.

There is also a supplier management system including registration, payment, and confidential documents archive and formation system to manage all the courses provided from internal and external universities, with the possibility to book them.

Polyclinic Campus Bio-medical of Rome

https://www.campusbiomedicohospital.com/
For this project, I worked on integrating into Joomla CMS custom features like photo and video gallery, custom search to find doctors and appointments with the possibility to book or cancel them, and integration and aggregation of clinical departments retrieved by an external service.
MARCH 2021 - MARCH 2023

HashiCorp Certified: Terraform Associate

HashiCorp

FEBRUARY 2020 - FEBRUARY 2023

Security+

CompTIA

OCTOBER 2019 - PRESENT

Cybersecurity Specialization - University of Maryland, College Park

Coursera

SEPTEMBER 2018 - SEPTEMBER 2020

AWS Certified Solutions Architect

Amazon Web Services

JULY 2015 - PRESENT

Cambridge English: Advanced

University of Cambridge

JUNE 2008 - PRESENT

Zend Certified Engineer

Zend

Libraries/APIs

Google AdWords, Terragrunt

Tools

Terraform, Ansible, NGINX, GitLab, GitLab CI/CD, Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS), Amazon Elastic Container Registry (ECR), Amazon CloudFront CDN, AWS ELB, Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS), Docker Hub, GitHub, Varnish, RabbitMQ, Capistrano, Grunt, Webpack, Amazon Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS), AWS CloudFormation, Packer, Jira, XHProf, Jenkins, Hudson, Microsoft Access, Amazon QuickSight, Amazon EKS, Provisioning Tools

Languages

PHP, PHP 7, SQL, Go, PHP 5, Lua, Bash, CSS, HTML, JavaScript, Python, Active Server Pages (ASP), Visual Basic 6 (VB6)

Platforms

Linux, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Docker, Amazon EC2, Kubernetes, Debian, Alpine Linux, AWS Cloud Computing Services, Proxmox, Mixpanel, Apache2, MaxScale, Percona, Mandrill, WordPress, Joomla, DigitalOcean, osCommerce

Paradigms

DevOps, Kanban, Agile, Microservices, Scrum, XP, Microservices Architecture, Objectives & Key Results (OKRs), Penetration Testing, Security Software Development, Fuzz Testing, Unit Testing, Functional Testing, Best Practices

Frameworks

Symfony 3, Symfony, React Native, Apache Thrift, AngularJS, PhalconPHP, PHPUnit, Selenium, Zend Framework, Jasmine, Symfony 1

Storage

MariaDB, Redis, MySQL, Amazon S3 (AWS S3), Elasticsearch, SQL Injection Protection, MongoDB, PostgreSQL, NoSQL

Other

CI/CD Pipelines, Cloud, Infrastructure as Code (IaC), Code Review, IT Project Management, Containers, Containerization, Linux Administration, Domain-driven Design (DDD), Galera Cluster, Jira Administration, Amazon Route 53, AWS Polly, Sprint Retrospectives, Gantt Chart, Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), Backlog Management, Proof of Concept (POC), Team Management, HHVM, Web Security, Identity & Access Management (IAM), Risk Management, Cryptography, English, Security, Usability Security, Proxy Servers, Load Balancers, Training, HAProxy, IIS, Microdata, Microformats, Schema.org, Hardware, Orchestration, Team Leadership, Line Management, Learning & Development, IT Product Management, Cost Control, Cost Reduction & Optimization, VM, Virtual Machines, Virtualization

Collaboration That Works

How to Work with Toptal

Toptal matches you directly with global industry experts from our network in hours—not weeks or months.

1

Share your needs

Discuss your requirements and refine your scope in a call with a Toptal domain expert.
2

Choose your talent

Get a short list of expertly matched talent within 24 hours to review, interview, and choose from.
3

Start your risk-free talent trial

Work with your chosen talent on a trial basis for up to two weeks. Pay only if you decide to hire them.

Top talent is in high demand.

Start hiring