Career Profile
I’ve been working with Linux and open source for the last 15 years. This experience allowed me to span across different software and technologies, explore various solutions, and implement creative combinations. It has been an incredible and stimulating journey, with many challenges and lots of opportunities.
I’ve explored many fields of IT: advanced networking, Linux server administration, web servers, databases, Samba AD DC, automation with Ansible.
I’ve been nominated outstanding member of the Zimbra forum, participating in the evolution of the platform. I closely followed the management of CVE-2019-9670 by the community, providing feedback and support to those impacted, and developed a script to obtain and install a Letsencrypt certificate in Zimbra.
I also gained strong experience in PHP programming, especially with Yii1.1 and Yii2 frameworks, developing complex and advanced applications. For a big b2c customer, I developed a small Vue app used to prepare deliveries, connecting via websocket to a Node.js app continuously reading weight from a balance.
Among the different tasks, I also have been providing I and II level support to customers, developing skills to provide the most efficient and proficient answer for the client. My broad knowledge in many IT fields allows me to understand customer requests better and provide the correct solution.
I consider myself curious and open-minded. When developing, I focus on optimization, speed, and security.
I always participated in open source, by providing help on forums and translating applications, but my first real code contribution was for the F-Spot photo management system, a C# based Gnome app.
For personal growth and career opportunities, I obtained the SAA-C03 AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Associate certification in May 2023.
Experiences
After many years in consultancy, I took a turn to my career by working as internal IT for a single company. This allowed me to focus and specialize on less topics, but also the chance to widen my expertise by developing in Javascript both on frontend and backend, as well as exploring new tools like Elasticsearch and Google Cloud.
- Linux administrator
- Network administrator (LAN, cloud)
- PHP developer
- React developer
- Node.js developer
- Technical assistance
Present since the early years, I grew and helped grow the Company, developing enterprise solutions with Linux in a country that barely knew the name at that time. I deployed Linux servers for various purposes, and developed web applications with PHP, MySQL, and Apache (later nginx). The internal and all the customers’ infrastructures are actively monitored with a Zabbix installation, which allowed us to promptly prevent and deal with possible outages. As the company grew, we had the chance to cultivate young talents coming from local technical schools and universities.
- Linux administrator
- Network administrator (LAN, cloud)
- PHP developer
- Technical leader
I was the main and only IT manager, with helpdesk, network development and maintenance tasks. The Company had five remote production plants and offices, all connected to the IBM iSeries at the headquarters.
- AS/400
- RPG and DB2 developer
- Support manager
RPG developer on IBM AS/400 (iSeries).
- AS/400
- RPG and DB2 developer
Projects
This is a short list of projects I developed recently.
We deployed a distributed AD network, with three Domain Controllers in cloud in different data centers.
In the last months, I dedicated time in implementing a solution to containerize the company’s PHP webapps, by creating Dockerfile and docker-compose.yaml files, both for production and development. Images are created by GitLab’s CI, and stored into its container registry.
I developed a PHP software to be placed between the host system and Mirth, before being delivered to going to Cadlink Server. The middleware had to hold HL7 orders and eventually manipulate them, in case the host sent an update.
I deployed a high available frontend proxy cache with nginx and keepalived, to front a Wordpress site for a 15k person Italian company
A 10+ year-long development project, a user management portal for a hotspot system based on FreeRadius and CoovaChilli. The PHP Yii application was developed to manage users, groups, federations, permissions, and was designed to allow authentication via SMS, PayPal or thirdy-party library management systems.
I developed a Yii2 PHP application used to feed a widely distributed mobile app for Italian municipalities. The backend is used to manage manually entered news, as well as externally provided information fetched from RSS feeds or API sources.
Open source contributions
I tried giving my 2 cents to the Open Source community with some small projects, hoping they could be useful for others.
A Bash script used to request and deploy Letsencrypt certificate to Zimbra Collaboration Server, with automatic renewal.
A set of PHP script to fetch full program episodes from the Italian Radio Deejay website, to create a podcast compatible XML file.
A Javascript test project, roughly finished. The goal was to design a REST API to lookup 3CX caller name from a Zimbra address book, and attempt to use Node.js and Fastify.
My simple setup for Home Assistant, managing a MCP23017 based board
A collection of scripts for live syncing two Zimbra instances. Not the original author, I just gave a ‘repository’ to the files residing on the wiki.
Extensible user management for Yii2 framework. While not a project of mine, the author handed me the maintenance when he couldn’t manage anymore.
I contributed the patch to build with Docker for Ian Walker’s zimbra-build-scripts