Filippo Conforti, Developer in Florence, Metropolitan City of Florence, Italy
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Filippo Conforti

Verified Expert  in Engineering

Software Developer

Location
Florence, Metropolitan City of Florence, Italy
Toptal Member Since
September 8, 2015

Previously the lead architect for Gucci's eCommerce business, Filippo specializes in developing beautiful applications with Ruby on Rails, and has 9+ years of engineering experience. He strongly believes in TDD as the only way to build rock-solid code that makes his clients happy. He loves building for other developers too, by designing and creating the REST APIs they wish they had.

Portfolio

Gucci
Akamai, Memcached, MySQL, PostgreSQL, Git, Ruby on Rails (RoR), Ruby
Ateapick
Amazon Web Services (AWS), Amazon Pay, Stripe, PayPal, OAuth, Cloudflare...
Independent
MySQL, Jakarta EE, Python

Experience

Availability

Part-time

Preferred Environment

Git, Terminal, MacOS

The most amazing...

...web app I've ever built is a social network for home swappers, powered by a Neo4J graph database and implementing the "six degrees of separation" theory.

Work Experience

E-Business Applications Architect

2011 - PRESENT
Gucci
  • Led the development and scaling of gucci.com, the company (homegrown) eCommerce platform built in Ruby on Rails.
  • Integrated the new mobile website with the existing platform and CMS.
  • Created a REST API for our concession partners, to let them get the catalogs, the stock, and prices, and to place orders directly from their sites.
  • Developed an image server (Ruby on Rails + ImageMagick) to dynamically create all our product image variations (with automatic resizes and crops) and to deliver them through Akamai.
  • Added some test coverage to the codebase and promote a TDD approach at least for all the core features.
  • Optimized the HTTP cache headers to drive our page caching strategy on Akamai and dramatically scale the site performances.
  • Constantly communicated with our business users to gather their project requirements and worked with the other engineers to match their business goals.
Technologies: Akamai, Memcached, MySQL, PostgreSQL, Git, Ruby on Rails (RoR), Ruby

Ruby on Rails Engineer

2007 - 2011
Ateapick
  • Created multiple web apps from scratch, starting from the requirements gathering to the application design and development, always using Ruby on Rails as my primary stack.
  • Configured and scaled all our clients' hosting infrastructure based on Linux machines, managing all the required redundancy, high availability, and backup strategies.
  • Configured and scaled all our clients' cloud resources, including AWS, Heroku, and Cloudflare.
  • Integrated multiple payment gateways (Paypal, Stripe, Amazon Payments) to accept payments and subscriptions.
  • Integrated multiple third-party APIs (Facebook, Twitter, Google Maps, Dropbox, Campaign Monitor, Mailchimp etc.) using the OAuth authorization standard whenever available.
Technologies: Amazon Web Services (AWS), Amazon Pay, Stripe, PayPal, OAuth, Cloudflare, Heroku, Git, Test-driven Development (TDD), Behavior-driven Development (BDD), Ruby on Rails (RoR), Ruby

Software Developer

2004 - 2006
Independent
  • Created multiple web applications using J2EE.
  • Created multiple applications using Python, which I still consider a beautiful language.
Technologies: MySQL, Jakarta EE, Python

Coding Problems

I developed responses in Ruby to a couple of coding problems. I coded two simple programs from scratch using Cucumber and RSpec for the behavior-driven development approach. The tests and programs can be run in the command line.

Gucci.com

I've been working on the Gucci.com eCommerce platform (Ruby on Rails) for almost 5 years, sitting side by side with our business users and leading the development of the site's new features to support their business goals. The platform is fully localized for 30+ countries from US and Europe to Japan, Korea, and China, each with their own languages, product catalogues, payment gateways, shipping vendors, warehouse systems, and legal requirements. My most successful projects have been the development of the gucci.com mobile website (responsive), the design and development of the platform REST APIs and the company dynamic image server. Conversion, performance, scalability, security, and UX are all first-class citizens in Gucci, and I've always done my best to keep them aligned to the outstanding quality of their products.

CommerceLayer

CommerceLayer is a multi-channel commerce API designed to power any eCommerce site, mobile app, or physical point of sale developed in any language or technology. All its resources can be fed by any source, either a CMS, a middleware or a legacy system interface. All the typical commerce features, including catalogues management, product stock, price lists, media, customers, orders, and payments are driven by its REST APIs. No user interfaces, just HTTP services. Commerce Layer talks to developers and their machines, and it's an open source project that I'm currently building with Ruby and Grape - Rails not required.

Contributors are welcome!

MissHobby.com

http://www.misshobby.com
MissHobby is a marketplace where Italian artisans - mainly women - can publish and sell their handcrafted items. I created a multi-vendor eCommerce platform from scratch (excluding the site design) with Ruby on Rails, integrating PayPal to process all the customer payments - that are split by vendor - and the merchants' accounting, to manage their recurring subscription and the platform fees. Each merchant has an admin area to manage their store settings, items, orders, customers, messaging etc. I developed every single feature of the application by following a BDD/TDD approach, using Cucumber and RSpec as my testing frameworks. After more than 6 years, MissHobby is still a fast growing community. The new owners are doing great in marketing the website and I'm happy to see that most of my (back-end) code is still there to power their growth.

Groupayments.com

Groupayments is a web app that I created to help people (including myself) collecting money from their friends, either for a group gift, a group trip, a party or whatever. As an organizer, you could create a groupayment, invite your friends to pay their quotes and check the payment status. The payment due reminders were sent automatically. For the development I used Ruby on Rails, integrating PayPal Adaptive to properly split the payments between the organizer and the platform, that charged a small fee for each transaction.

Kubalula.com

Kubalula was a social network for home swappers that I created when Facebook was just being born and the word "social network" itself was almost unknown. As a traveler, you could build your own trusted network (your kubalula) made of friends and friends of friends (FOAF) up to three degrees of separation, so that your hosts and guests were in some way connected to you through your direct contacts or their friends. It was technically a Ruby on Rails application implementing some of the most popular graph algorithms to let the users browse their networks (fast) and explore their destinations on a (Google) map.

DoggyMind.com

DoggyMind was a social network... for dogs! Basically, dog owners (a.k.a, dog lovers) could create their 4-legged friends' profiles and start interacting with the community, by "sniffing," "barking," and eventually dating their friends. Puppies were first-class citizens in the community and you could also adopt one if you liked. It was a Ruby on Rails web application that included a very targeted marketplace for pet accessories, clothing and food.

Languages

Markdown, Ruby, Swift, Go, SQL, Python, JavaScript

Frameworks

GrapesJS, OAuth 2, Ruby on Rails (RoR), AngularJS

Libraries/APIs

Shopify API, ImageMagick, PayPal API, API Development, Google Maps, Dropbox API, Amazon API, Facebook API, Stripe Connect, Twitter API, Stripe

Tools

Git, Amazon Pay, Terminal

Paradigms

DevOps, REST, Behavior-driven Development (BDD), Test-driven Development (TDD), App Development, Scrum, Kanban

Platforms

Amazon Web Services (AWS), Heroku, WordPress, MacOS, Jakarta EE, Rackspace, Engine Yard, Linux

Other

Video Streaming, Image Processing, HTTP, Cloudflare, Freelancing, APIs, Programming, Remote Work, API Development Specialist, Machine Learning, Akamai, OAuth, PayPal

Storage

Neo4j, MongoDB, Memcached, Elasticsearch, MySQL, PostgreSQL, Redis

1997 - 2004

Master's Degree in Computer Science

University of Florence - Italy

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