About me
I started working with web stuff in 2005: when I was 15 years old. I still remember the first ugly pages made with Microsoft FrontPage 2003. At the beginning it was just a hobby which I officially turned it into my job since 2012.
One day I was exploring Microsoft Office and I came across FrontPage. I opened it trying to understand what it was useful for. Then I searched on Google what "Microsoft FrontPage" actually was and when I found it, I had a lightbulb moment: it was a program for creating web pages. So I started playing with it without knowing what I was really doing.
At first glance the pattern was similar to PowerPoint: just dropping your content and making something appears. I had no idea that the editor was writing the HTML code for me. To be honest I had no clue what HTML was at all, but the satisfaction that I felt the first time I created a web page was incredible. Connecting pages between them using hyperlinks, create tables, add images, change colors... It was amazing! Just like a child using Paint for the first time!
The beginning
In 2012 I had my first real experience on the field. I started collaborating with a local web agency that developed websites with a custom CMS. It wasn't something really relevant, in fact I usually omit that experience because it lasted only for few months, but it teached me a lot.
The freelancer
In 2013 I decided to move forward and I started working as a freelance developer with customers like companies, agencies and shops. It was an amazing opportunity for me, indeed I learnt how to manage resources, time, money and deadlines. Being close to customers pushed me to be as more precise as possibile on every aspects of the job: starting from the first meeting with the stakeholders to the go-live of the project.
Service Lab (2014-2016)
Service Lab was the first agency I collaborated with. My task was to build websites from scratch by using Joomla CMS and T3 Framework, paying attention to the general UX and the responsive design, in order to optimize web pages for mobile devices. I guess this has been a significant trigger to my career, because in Service Lab I started "being obsessed" with performances and optimizations. Since smartphones were becoming crucial in our daily life, websites had to be compliant and optimized for that type of navigation. Beside the "mobile first" UI development, it was also important to develop products that used as less resources as possible (CSS, JavaScript and lazy images).
2015 was another important year for my career, because I was assigned a complex project - a full web stack application - to be developed from scratch. Here I met Laravel and it was love at first sight, indeed it's been 9 years that I have been developing full stack applications with it and I still love it as the first time.
SuperDesign (2015-2017)
In 2015 I started collaborating also with SuperDesign. Here I learnt how to build perfect pixels websites and my tasks were just about front end development. It was a great boost for my professional development, because I had the chance to level up my CSS and JavaScript/jQuery skills.
The enterprise developer
After 4 years as a freelancer I chose to become an enterprise developer. The reasons behind this choice were two:
- I wanted to work in a team of people who shared same goals
- I was fed up of looking for jobs and customers by myself
Axélero (2017 - 2018)
In 2017 I joined Axélero - a company which made tailored websites - as a full stack developer.
The first project I worked on was a PHP back end application that downloaded and saved into a database emails of a third party service: the goal was to archive emails - which had a 30 days due date - to make them available for the advisory people.
The second project was the assets manager. It was basically an application used for assigning and managing assets (smartphone, tablets, computers, cars and so on) to employees and collaborators.
The game changer of my career was the Axélero's CRM: a SPA written in React.js and Redux that fetched and rendered data by consuming REST APIs. With this application was possibile to see all the customers's info (payment, contract and contacts). This project has been an amazing experience: it was my first time with modern front end development and it gave me the opportunity to explore this topic which has become my current daily job activity.
I also worked on a React Native mobile application. It was an app with the purpose to understand if it could be useful, for the company, to have a mobile application to help resellers in their work, but unfortunately it wasn't never published. Anyway it was a nice try, because I had the opportunity to see something different and discover how easy is to develop mobile application by simply writing JavaScript React code.
MotorK (2018-2023)
In 2018 I joined MotorK as front end developer. My professional experience here can be divided into two parts:
- 2018-2020
- 2020-2023
2018-2020
During the first two years, I developed Vue.js applications: both SPA with Vuex and Vue Router, and simple applications to embed in the SaaS product of the company.
In the meanwhile I also worked on the company's design system, by following the Atomic Design Pattern, in order to provide to developers components - written both in PHP and Vue.js - to build consistent user interfaces based on a set of shared rules and behaviours. As always, it was a great experience because I had never worked on a design system and never used Storybook before.
2020-2023
In 2020 the company decided to rebuild "from scratch" a modern version of its product and I was assigned to this new team as front end engineer. Basically the old product had problems related to web performances (bad Pagespeed scores) and tech debt. Since the software was 10 years old, and it was developed from a lot of people, the architecture and the quality of the code became a mess. So our goal was to improve these two aspects and we started by choosing a new fresh modern stack:
- Themosis to improve the WordPress DevX
- Tailwind CSS as utility-first CSS framework
- Alpine.js for building reactive user interfaces
In addition to the new stack, we also applied techniques like: Critical CSS, code splitting, dynamic loading of chunks and Intersection Observer, to improve TBT, FCP and CLS and to serve as less files as possibile. Essentially the idea was to provide and load only the mandatory resources and download all the rest in an asynchronous way.
Career break (2024)
In December 2023 I resigned from MotorK to follow new adventures and I decided to take a 4-month career break to rest my mind and body, as well as to update my professional skills by attending online courses and working on a personal project.
Vivaticket (May 2024 - Now)
In May 2024 I joined Vivaticket as front end engineer. Vivaticket is a company operating in the online ticketing for sporting events, concerts, art exhibitions, and amusement parks.
My first job was about optimizing and fixing the front end part of the main site, in order to simplify the user experience and improve performance.
Subsequently, I worked for a few weeks on the company's CMS, a tool used to manage the editorial content published on the website. The CMS is a SPA written in Vue.js, Vuex and Vue Router; Vuetify is the UI library chosen for developing the user interface.
The current project I am working on is an interactive SeatMap designed for stadiums, theaters, or rooms, allowing users to book seats. The entire codebase is written in TypeScript without relying on any frameworks.