UNIX/Linux analyst, programmer, system engineer and administrator

 

http://www.deliveryhero.com/                             Mar 2013 ­ July 2013 

Delivery Hero is an international holding building the next generation global online food ordering 

platform. 

Role: System administrator and devops/release engineer 

Although the workplace was in Berlin, Germany, I worked mainly on the Unix/Linux systems 

serving the UK market. My tasks comprised monitoring of the IT infrastructure, troubleshooting in 

both systems and applications code, software deployment, system upgrades, performance tests 

and tuning. Gross salary: EUR 48000/year. 

 

2012: A gap year, studying functional programming, but also physics and mathematics in East 

Germany. I casually attended lectures and seminars at University of Leipzig. Language of 

tuition was English. I developed analytical skills I can now put to use whatever I do. I learned 

how to apply advanced mathematical ideas to build models of complex physical systems, and 

how to make use of the scientific method to attain the kind of scientific knowledge you can be 

reasonably sure of. 

 

http://www.sensewhere.com                                Jul 2011 ­ Sep 2011 

Sensewhere Ltd, formerly SATSIS Ltd, is a University of Edinburgh's spinoff, developing a 

crowdsourced indoor location system for Android phones. It lets users' devices map the 

inside of buildings automatically  building up a database of radio frequency access 

point data  selfgenerating and selfcorrecting as it goes along to deliver accuracy to 

within around 10 metres. 

 

Role: Web Developer and System Administrator 

This was an urgent role, requiring an experienced programmer to work hard during the whole 

summer, with very strict deadlines. My task was to quickly design and implement the 

serverside part of their seamless locator technology. That involved the design and 

implementation of a custom TCP/IP protocol, some web services and a large database. I also 

promoted best practices, assessed software quality, maintained systems uptodate and secure, 

and faced scalability problems. I reinstalled, optimized and boosted the performance of their 

LAMP server to dramatically improve response times. I reengineered their database structure 

to make queries more efficient and rethought the data model to achieve a higher level of 

query parallelism and eliminate most of the offline data processing which was required in the 

initial data model. 

Reasons I left: the salary was low compared to the amount of work done, but they could not 

pay more being a startup with an initial low budget further interesting development would 

not have come before a few months I did not have any kind of ownership of the company and 

no stockoptions were available I decided to have a gap year to pursue the study of science. 

Technologies: Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP5, C, Berkeley DB, Google Maps API v3. Gross 

salary: £27000/year. 

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http://www.daxtra.com                                    Aug 2010 ­ Jul 2011 

Daxtra Tecnologies Ltd is a specialist in recruitment technologies and produces software for 

automated CV parsing and advanced search engines. 

 

Role: Perl Application Engineer 

My tasks were web scraping, test automation, data extraction/conversion and system 

integration. I completely reengineered and redeveloped their web harvesting and 

dataextraction technology to include full HTTP 1.1 and JavaScript support and simplify the 
development and maintenance of web scrapers. Reasons I left: I had improved on almost 

everything that could be improved here Perl is not a mainstream language and wanted to get 

back to some PHP development in order to keep uptodate with the latter as well I needed a 

more challenging job and was tempted by a telecommunication spinoff of the University of 

Edinburgh to join them for developing a novel geolocation technology. Salary:  £27000/year 

 

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http://www.miur.it                                                  Aug 2009 ­ Jul 2010 

The Ministry of Education, Universities and Research (Ministero dell'Istruzione, 

dell'Università e della Ricerca, or MIUR) is the ministry of the Italian government for the 

national education system, the Italian universities and research. 

 

Role: OpenKnowTech project. Various activities related to free software (development, 

technical support, teaching). 

I used IBM blade servers with tape libraries and external storages (DS4700), implemented 

automatic selective backup scripts, provided highlevel support services to 

Windows/Linux/Mac OS X clients and hw/sw buying advice. While I was doing multiple 

custom Debian/Ubuntu/CentOS graphical workstation installations I developed a simple, 

effective, adhoc clonation/replication system. I built readytouse Free/Open BSD and 

Ubuntu Server NATrouters solutions (using leading firewalling software like Packet Filter 

and Iptables), implemented VPNs with OpenVPN, DNS servers with Bind (including 

splithorizon configurations), Samba servers (reliable Unix domain controllers and file 

sharing for Windows clients) and reusable virtual machines images (Virtual Box, VmWare). 

Reasons I left: this was a contract role. 

___________________________________________________________________________ 

http://www.ccictsud.it/                                             Jun 2008 ­ May 2009 

The Competence Centre ICTSud (Centro di Competenza ICTSud) is carrying out an industrial 

research program aimed at building a digital ecosystem with some of its associate organizations for 

boosting technology transfer services. In particular, the program focuses on analysis, design, 

implementation and test of an innovative digital ecosystem architecture to effectively support 

complex business organizations involved in software applications, development and distribution, 

as well as service delivery. 

Role: Programmer, systems analyst, network and phone technician. 

As a programmer I designed and developed the entire company's web portal, using a LAMP 

(Linux+Apache+MySQL+PHP) system, the PEAR libraries and an extendible programmable 

CMS. This is a quite complex databased site with an internal reserved area comprising an 

inventory, an advanced mailsending facility, realtime reports, custom tools for the 

management of employees, job contracts, documents and registers, partners' meetings and 

much more. As a sysadmin I built the company's computer network infrastructure at all 

ISOOSI levels and I even programmed its telephone switchboard. Reasons I left: this was a 

contract role. 

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http://www.cnr.it  Various contracts between Nov 2004 and Feb 2008 

The Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche (CNR) or National Research Council, is an Italian 

public organization set up to support scientific and technological research. 

Role: I worked for the ICARCNR Research Institute (Institute of Calculus and Networks). 

There I installed and configured all the network applicances (access points, a Cisco router 

and some switches configured with 802.1Q IEEE VLANs), computational clusters and 

the following network services: DHCP, NAT, primary and secondary DNSs, NTP, web
 proxy, web log analysis systems, file, email, database and web application servers 

like Tomcat and Glassfish. Reasons I left: this was a contract role. 

 

 

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http://www.unical.it              Jul 2002 ­ Sep 2004 

The University of Calabria (Università della Calabria, UNICAL) is a staterun university in 

Italy. It currently has about 35,000 students, 800 teaching and research staff and 

about 700 administrative staff. 

Role: Analyst/programmer, database and Unix systems administrator 

I worked for the Department of Electronic and Computer Science (DEIS). . I designed and 
developed a web site to monitor students' careers, including import/export/cleaning of data and 
chart/report generation (LAMP, JpGraph). I supervised the first Computer Engineering 
Faculty collaborative wiki (Phpwiki, patching the source code when needed). I designed, 
developed and maintained Wikilearn, a custom easytouse semistructured wikibased CMS 
for elearning, online tutoring, exam booking, attendance control, etc. (LAMP + the Pear OO 
framework). I installed, configured and kept secure many 
development/database/cvs/application/internet servers for DEIS, mainly FreeBSD and Red 
Hat/Fedora Linux. Here's a sample of my admin notes related to a web/email server that is 
still used and has been up for years without any problem (Italian only). Reasons I left: 
this was a contract role. 
http://www.polimi.it                                  May 2000 ­ Jul 2002 

The Polytechnic of Milan (Politecnico di Milano) is the largest technical university in Italy, 
with about 38,700 students and has a main inhouse web office (SIWA, SIto Web di Ateneo). 
Role: Web developer and systems administrator 
I implemented most of the backend scripts of the Polytechnic main site using Perl, AMP 
(Solaris/Linux + Apache + MySQL + PHP) and some C for the most requested 

services. I designed and developed the site of the Management Engineering Department 
with LAMP + templates for full separation of business logic from presentation logic. I 

used Htdig to implement the search engine. I designed and implemented the first 
version of the TOP (Test On Line), a web clientserver application for assessing the 
starting level of students before admission to Polytechnic faculties (LAMP + 

clientside JavaScript). For the PoliMI intranet, I developed the registry of research 

paper, using LAMP and XML technologies. Reasons I left: this was a contract role. 

Referees in the UK: 

Prof. Tughrul Arslan,  Technology Officer at Sensewhere Ltd 
Email: T.Arslan@ed.ac.uk

Mark Orr, Chief Software Architect at Daxtra Technologies Group 
Email: mark.j.l.orr@googlemail.com 

 

For Italian referees I can provide copies of reference letters written in English.