Curriculum Vitae

Personal details

Work experience

Jun 2006-Oct 2007: On contract for Catlin Group Ltd. as a senior JEE and J2EE engineer working on their development insurance underwriting application. This was implemented on multiple servers (weblogic 8.1 and 9.2) with cooperating webapps. The technologies involved included various versions of the struts framework, JMS, XA transactions with Micorosft SQL server. My work included converting parts of the back end persistence layer from using EJB 2.1 to using the java persistence API (JPA) with hibernate. I also worked on introducing new AJAX technologies such as Direct Web Remoting.

Jan 2006-May 2006: Working for Deutsche Bank on behalf of Rule Financial as a senior java developer. I worked on a real time interactive trading platform (autobahn FI) for trading interest rate swaps. The application was being upgraded to take advantage of modern AJAX techniques, so as well as J2EE technologies as I was also developing in javascript, XML, CSS and DOM .

May 2005-Dec 2005: On contract with Macro 4 as a senior developer on a project to create a web based front end (M4Explorer) to an IBM mainframe product (DumpMaster). My job involved developing an apache module in C, C++ to communicate with the mainframe. The emphasis was on reliability and modular, reusable code that could be used in other products. The product deployed on both windows and UNIX environment. I was involved in writing and testing the deployment scripts for zLinux: RedHat 31bit, RedHat 64bit and SUSE 64bit.

Mar 2001-Mar 2005: Software architect and lead developer on a number of projects, mostly involving internet related technologies. The projects I worked on included:

• Poster Choice, design of a database driver ecommerce site which sells directly to consumers. I worked on all aspects of the implementation of this project which was implemented with J2EE technologies such as EJB and JMS. The application had to integrate with many third party applications, such as payment gateways and product databases.
• Top Celebrity Pages, design of an entertainment site with information about celebrities including up to date celebrity news which required knowledge of XML, RDF, RSS feeds and internet spidering robots.
• SMS messenger, design of a high availability, fault tolerant SMS messaging server and gateway. The server was written in C for high performance and compatibility with many UNIX platforms. It required programming for SMP, using shared memory and asynchronous communication. My team also designed the API for remote access to the server with libraries in Java, C and perl. A technical knowledge of GSM modems, X.25 modems, SMS, XML and TCP/IP was required.
• Address web, design of a multithreaded server to access post office address data locally and remotely. This involved integration with a number of third party applications (including projects with BMRB International and Arc en Ciel) and required knowledge of PHP, C and java. The software was written in C and deployed on both UNIX and Win32 platforms.
• Space Reg, design of a domain name registrar, DNS administration and hosting service. The service was designed mostly as an apache, mod_perl application. The job also involved interfacing with many third party internet services such as multiple redundant payment gateways (protx, paypal, secpay) and shared registration systems (OpenSRS. Extensive technical knowledge of many standards such as SOAP, XML-RPC, SPF, PKI and domain keys was required.
• Conexant based ADSL PCI modem, upgrading the linux kernel driver to the new linux 2.6 API.

Mar 2000-Mar 2001: Senior developer for Bulb Systems which was a design/IT consultancy. I was in charge of a number of website projects, involving the design and integration of software in HTML, javascript, macromedia flash, perl and SQL. I was also in charge of the company's IT infrastructure which consisted of UNIX (FreeBSD), linux (redhat, SUSE), Mac OS, Microsoft windows networked machines and involved setup and administration of NFS, RAID, NIS, firewall and apache machines. During this period the largest project I worked on was to design the content management system (CMS) used by the website for siemens traffic controls.

Oct 1997-Mar 2000: Founded SpaceSurfer Ltd, a company setup to run a number of online tools for webmasters which I designed. At the time these tools were revolutionary and included the design of a search engine and spidering internet robot, implemented using perl and java.

Easter 1995: 7 weeks work for DJL software consultancy continuing from the summer 1994 work.

Summer 1994: 7 weeks work at the Marine Environment Unit, Joint Research Centre (Ispra, Italy). On contract with DJL software consultancy developing software to decode, display and atmospherically correct satellite image data. Carried out using pascal, fortran and IDL.

Summer 1993: 7 weeks work at the TFT laboratory, Imperial College. Simulating and designing column display driver circuits for TFT displays. Carried out using VHDL and C.

Education

Oct 1995-Oct 1997: PhD at Imperial College. The work was in the field of reconfigurable computing and hardware/software co-design. This was not completed, however as part of this work I designed, tested and built a reconfigurable computer based on XILINX 6200 FPGA's with an Intel i960 to run the OS and interface with the host computer.

Oct 1990-Jul 1994: Masters course in Electrical and electronic engineering at Imperial College. I graduated with a second class honours (upper division) degree and was awarded a commendation for my final year project which involved the simulation and design of a neural computer.

Sep 1978-July 1990: Secondary school at European School in Varese (Italy) with a 2 year period at European School in Culham (England). Graduated with a European Baccalaureate, overall average of 77.05/100, my optional courses were chemistry (7.8/10), physics (9.4/10) and advanced mathematics (8.7/10).

Professional skills

Languages

English: Fluent. Italian: Fluent. French: Excellent spoken and written. German: A little written and spoken. Spanish: Basic spoken.

Interests

I am interested in tennis, skiing, snowboarding, travel, science and technology.