System Administration Developer in Roma, Italy

This site features cloud infrastructure design for all web properties of the group. The scope of the project was the migration from classic hosting to a multi-zone cloud environment. This new environment had to be resilient, able to manage 3Mpv/month, able to react to traffic peaks in
less than 5m (e.g. during F1 events traffic increases 10 times, in case of accident 40 times). We chose Amazon AWS and we redesigned apps to take advantage of all AWS components like computational instances, dedicated databases, load balancers, Memcached servers,and CDN, along with PHP optimizations. Load tests demonstrated good results, with >80% savings on starting costs. Nowadays, the infrastructure is composed by several EC2 instances and several RDS instances in multi-zone + multi-read replicas. We increased the total number of instances up to 200. The infrastructure also takes advantage of Amazon S3 and CloudFront.

I grew this startup from its 2010 inception until its market launch, firstly as the CEO and CTO and later delegating the CEO role in order to focus on tech matters. During that time, I performed usability tests on the interface, filed a patent for a technology used in the app, and struck deals with major European credit cards processors. The team studied market strategies, managed the business budget, and presented the idea to many shows, contests, investors, etc. As CTO, I coordinated the development of 4 different apps descending from the various product evolutions. We developed for Android, iOS, and web.

A mobile app aiming to save your queuing time. You can use Qurami in selected universities, hospitals, or public offices in order to get a virtual queue ticket and to monitor the queue directly from your smartphone. Server architecture is based on Silex and communicates with remote Java agents through XMPP protocol. An API to interact with mobile devices is provided by the server and a multi-platform mobile app was developed (Android iOS, Windows, BlackBerry, and Symbian). Critical point are the large number of remote agents (potentially thousands), scalability, stability, and privacy. We implemented it all on the AWS stack. There were also critical management points as Qurami is distributed around many places in Italy.

Punctis is a web app for social engagement. Its main purpose is to collect user actions on several websites and assigning prizes for those actions. I came in to create a production infrastructure to serve big customers such as news websites and big brands. I designed their infrastructure, handling development, testing, and the production environments with automated migrations and automated scalability. It was all implemented on AWS using EC2 and RDS. Since the main load is not the website but the REST API, we decided to not use CloudFront.

Beatpick is a web app developed in Symphony2 making use of media server and media player from Adobe. My work consists of 3 main tasks: changing the app to manage Japanese market differences, keeping the original app working, and managing automated migrations to different versions. I replaced all proprietary technology from Amazon with open source products (provided and configured by other team members), taking care that no disruption happened in the platform. I also migrated the whole application and media library to Amazon AWS using EC2, RDS, S3, and CloudFront (including stress test and automation for fail recovery).

I worked on several different projects for Telethon, including the payment form currently in use online. I handled UX and CMS development using Drupal, the integrating PayPal API. Some other modules to track referrals and to enable external inclusion of the form used as well. The electronic card module was based on a crowdsourced contest on 99design. The registration form is for a national initiative in multiple locations called Walk of Life. The project was simple, but the timeframe was very short: I had 5 days in total and I managed it while working with an offshore dev team.

A ticket marketplace for concerts and events. It's a Symfony 1.4 project that features many external APIs for shipping (UPS), payments (PayPal), and SMS (PROmemo). It features a multilingual portal in it-en-es-ru. The project is long term and employs devs from many countries with a very short turnover. The most important issue to manage is the knowledge transfer. Recently I managed the infrastructure renewal migrating the app from Ubuntu 8 to Ubuntu 14, automating deployment and migrating versioning from SVN to Git. Server infrastructure is partly in Amsterdam and partly in Barcelona. It’s pretty small as it is composed by one web server and one database.