Hi There

I'm Fabio Cicerchia

Passionate Solutions Architect

What do I do?
πŸ›  Automate (a lot) · ⚑ Optimise (whenever possible) · ♻️ Refactor (rinse & repeat)

What do I work on?
🏒 Architecture · πŸ“¦ Containers / VMs · πŸš€ Deployments · πŸ— Infrastructure (bare-metal / cloud) · 🚨 Monitoring & Alerting · πŸš₯ Pipelines

What could you call me?
Automation Architect · Build & Release Engineer · Cloud Engineer · DevOps Architect · DevOps Engineer · Software Engineer · Solutions Architect

What I used to be?
Chief Technology Officer · Frontend Developer · Lead Developer · NodeJS Developer · PHP Developer · Freelance/Startupper · Sysadmin · Technical Project Manager
More about me

I'm Fabio, a Passionate Solutions Architect and Application Developer with ~20 years of experience. Always enjoying creating quality web applications and web portals using cutting-edge technologies.

Throughout the years I’ve worked in different markets and industries, covering different roles, here’s a quick summary of my career path:

  • Freelance, allowed to be comfortable working with the UI/UX (User Interface / User Experience) side and improve the communication with the clients.
  • Employee, gave a huge experience of team and company dynamics, it also helped growing on the technical side by using different stacks, frameworks and methodologies.
  • Startupper, increased my flexibility and versatility, by covering different topics such as marketing, sales, management, financial planning, accounting and bookkeeping, and much more.
  • Chief, responsible for the whole IT area: from the physical infrastructure (mixed bare-metal and cloud servers) to the application architecture (web and mobile), from Projects Management to IT Recruiting, from writing procedures and policies to their implementation (eg. GDPR - General Data Protection Regulation).

Thanks to my background, I'm totally confident working either alone or in a team, remotely or on-site, in building web applications and web portals by following the best practices with a particular attention to Maintainability, Scalability, Reliability, and Performances.

Working in several positions, from Software Developer to Frontend/Backend Developer, from Sysadmin to Team Leader, allowed me to work on each layer of a web application, covering the whole life-cycle from initial requirements gathering to design, planning, coding, testing, documentation, deployment, and maintenance.

During the tech career I've managed to build these core strengths:

  • Tech Stack Flexibility
  • Productivity Orientation
  • Work Passion
  • Continuous Learning
  • Problem-Solving Mindset
  • Product Management
  • Project Management
  • Performance Optimisation
  • Software Maintainability

Constantly looking for opportunities and challenges to improve my skills while providing creative and high-quality solutions.

Professional Skills

FullStack Developer 80%
DevOps 95%
Project Manager 75%
Recruiter 60%
Result Oriented 99%
Processes Optimisation 99%

Work Experience

2022 - Today

Treatwell

Platform Engineer

Read more

Working on AWS, Kubernetes, IaC, Cost Monitoring, Observability, Platform.

AWS (CloudFormation, CloudFront, ECR, EKS, RDS, Route53, S3, VPC) Kubernetes Docker Terraform Kanban

2021 - Today

10x Software Engineer Academy

Owner

Read more

2020 - 2022

Radical Storage (formerly BAGBNB)

Senior Software & Cloud Engineer

Read more

Working on IaC, GitOps, Cost Monitoring, Observability, Alerting.

AWS (CloudFormation, CloudFront, ECR, ECS, Route53, S3, SQS) BDD CQRS DDD Docker Go Kanban Microservices PHP

2016 - 2020

Skuola.Net

Chief Technology Officer

Read more

Working on new strategies to, continuously, improve the quality of the technical projects and make the internal process leaner. Took charge of the whole IT architecture in a very short time and built a team from scratch for the Head Quarter in Rome. Worked directly on the optimisation of the architecture in terms of uptime, on the implementation of a geographical nodes redundancy in order to manage any downtime on the Data Centers, on the tech stack upgrade process (dated 2013), on the optimisation of the loading times, and on the implementation of the GDPR Policies.
Managing the interactions cross-teams by facilitating the different phases: requirement analysis, epic/story planning, estimation and forecasting, execution, delivery and follow-up.
Introduced several approaches and methodologies: standup meetings, retrospectives (internal and cross-team), gantt and burn-down charts, issue tracking system (Jira), support tracking system (company wide), deployment summaries, kanban board, planning poker, no estimates (not fully adopted), team capacity planning.
Chief Technical Officer and Lead Developer, Software Architect, Agile (SCRUM, XP) Facilitator, System Administrator, Recruiter.
Projects: Skuola.net, Ripetizioni Skuola.net, Matematicamente.it, SOS Studenti

Ansible Apache AWS (EC2, Polly, S3) Docker Swarm ElasticSearch Foreman Galera GitLab GitLab CI Jira Kanban Kubernetes MariaDB MaxScale Nginx Packer Percona Proxmox (on bare-metal) ProxySQL PHP React Native Redis Symfony 3 Terraform Varnish

2015 - 2017

Lead Developer & Owner

Read more

Created an aggregation platform for programming courses and events, in many countries, focused on developers. Took care of all the product aspects, from the IT architecture to the planning, and the implementation of marketing and sales strategies, from the scouting process of providers, clients and partners to the relationships management, from budget management to the hiring process in several areas.
DXpertise is an IT training course aggregation platform that allow developers to find the best courses available on the market. The platform is made by developers for developers with the aim to increase the knowledge level of each one of us in order to make the whole industry better, more challenging, more qualified, more satisfying, and more fun! Want to prove yourself and get better? Join us, we are going to help you achieving it.

AdWords Capistrano CSS DigitalOcean ElasticSearch HTML5 Mandrill MariaDB Microdata & Microformats MixPanel Nginx PHP 7 RabbitMQ Redis SEO Schema.org SparkPost Symfony 3

2015 - 2016

Immobiliare.it

Senior Software Engineer

Read more

Learned the internal processes and technology stack of Immobiliare.it in order to replicate it to LuxuryEstate.com and mentor the team who was working on the project. We’ve managed to work on a restyle of the UI and write from scratch the whole codebase. The whole team managed to learn new approaches such as code reviews, kanban boards, morning standup meetings and advanced tools such as Apache Thrift, Capistrano, GitLab, Grunt, PHP 7, Symfony 3, WebPack.

Apache Thrift Capistrano Code Review CSS GitLab GitLab CI Grunt HHVM Kanban Board MariaDB PHP7 Standup Meetings Webpack XHProf

2013 - 2015

iovox

Senior Developer

Read more

Introduced some improvements related to the internal technical processes, especially adopting agile methodologies, unit and functional tests, advanced code versioning. As a tech lead on some internal projects I've taken care of several phases of their lifecycle such as requirements gathering and estimation of the user-stories, code-reviews and post-releases retrospectives.
Some of the clients I dealt with: Autotrader, Trader Media, Golden Pages IE, 192.com.

Agile AngularJS Apache Bash CSS Code Coverage Datawarehouse HTML JavaScript Jenkins Jira MariaDB MongoDB Pair Programming Phalcon PHP PHPUnit Profiling REST Selenium Unit Testing Zend Framework

2012 - 2013

fusepump

Senior Developer

Read more

Working in a team to develop a cutting edge real-time statistic system, then, after few months, I became the Lead Developer of the project, reporting direct to the CTO. My everyday duties were basically technical project management, product planning and code development.
Some of the clients I dealt with: ModelZone, Staples, Chemist Direct.

Agile Apache AWS Bash CSS Code Coverage HTML JavaScript Jasmine Jira JSONΒ­RPC MongoDB MySQL PHP PHPUnit Redis REST SCRUM Unit Testing XHProf

2010 - 2012

DNSEE

Web Developer / Project Tech Lead

Read more

Working as Lead Developer to a big project, reporting directly to the CTO. My everyday duties and responsibilities were basically technical project management, customer relationships, internal / external training, team management (3 Developers, 1 Art Director, 1 Sys Admin, 1 Account, 1 Quality Assurance), and code development.
Some of the clients I dealt with: San Raffaele, Policlinico Campus Biomedico, Samsung.

Agile Apache CSS Code Coverage HTML Hudson JavaScript Jira Joomla MySQL PHP Selenium Symfony Unit Testing XP

2003 - 2012

FREELANCE

Read more

Working on showcase web sites and custom web applications, interfacing directly with the clients and taking care of every single step of the development, from the kick off to the delivery of the projects.
Some of the clients I dealt with: Studio Baggio, TBS srl, Good Night and Good Luck, OCE srl, Cilia Bus, Comet Expo.

Apache Bash Capistrano CSS GIT HTML5 JavaScript Jenkins Microdata & Microformats MongoDB MySQL NodeJS PHP Profiling Redis REST SEO Silex Static Code Analysis Symfony Wordpress

2008 - 2010

Populis (formerly GoAdv)

Web Developer

Read more

Working on the development, from scratch, of the front-end side of a user management system integrated into all the websites in the Excite network and deployed in 6 different countries (UK, Germany, Spain, France, Netherlands and Italy).
Main activities:
- Management of channels Video, Bynight, MIX and Blog of Excite
- Creation of user management system (frontend side) of Excite
- Maintenance of the sites of Excite Europe Network, the Network NanoPublishing and corporate sites
- Maintenance of a system for tracking ROI

CSS Functional Testing HTML JavaScript Joomla MySQL MySQL Pair Programming PHP PostgreSQL Python Selenium Wordpress Zend Framework

2007

ADQ

Web / Software Developer

Read more

Managed and maintained two live core products, one e-commerce website and one travelling online community.
Main projects:
- StockInformatica (http://www.stockinformatica.com)
- ItalianCamper (http://www.italiancamper.com)
- NoPayZone (http://www.nopayzone.com)

Access DB ASP CSS EΒ­Commerce HTML IIS JavaScript MySQL osCommerce PHP Visual Basic Wordpress

2005 - 2006

THE ITALIAN TOUCH

Web Developer

Read more

CSS HTML MySQL PHP

2004 - 2005

STUDIO BONITO

Hardware / Software Consultant

Read more

CSS Hardware HTML Visual Basic 6

Projects

Badge-Poser

The PHP badges, renders some badges for your readme with the packagist information.

HTML PHP

go-proxy-cache

Simple Reverse Proxy with Caching, written in Go, using Redis.

Go

nginx-lua

Nginx 1.19+ with LUA support based on Alpine Linux, Amazon Linux, Debian, Fedora and Ubuntu.

Dockerfile

Code Challenge Review Checklist

Opinionated Checklist for Reviewing a Code Challenge.

HTML

Developer's Learning Path

Developer's Learning Path | List of great resources.

skuola-tech-test

Check that an anagram of a string is contained in another string.

PHP

wipe-free-space

CLI Wipe Free Space.

Shell

S3Backupper

S3 Backup Tool (based on Restic).

Shell

Flash Cards - 10x Software Engineer

FLASH CARDS - 10x Software Engineer: hundreds of IT terms, synthetic description of each term.

React Native

Keep In Touch

Let's KEEP IN TOUCH: connect back to your friends. Just swipe and start chatting, randomly selected from your contacts.

React Native

COVID-19 Spreading in Italy

CLI Script + Web GUI for COVID-19 Trends in Italy, based on the Official Data.

Go JavaScript

salmonjs

Web Crawler in Node.js to spider dynamically whole websites.

JavaScript

BONZAI

This project allow you to protect effectively your sources, without losing performances. The only free, open-source and everyone accessible, solution that lets you sleep soundly.

PHP

WP Development Utilities

This script is useful during the development of WordPress, because will extend with a set of functions.

PHP

Talks

2021

PUG Roma

Save Yourself From A Disaster

The only certain thing is that it’s not a matter of IF there’ll be a disaster but rather WHEN, so better be not caught off guard. I’ll show and guide you through the details of each step I took to make my websites disaster-proof, while keeping my cloud spending on a tight leash (so you could do this too).

Slides | Video | Link

2020

PUG Roma / Codemotion

Badge Poser v3.0 - A DevOps Journey

Sharing the whole journey experience. Starting with the handover of the keys of the pandora box, wandering around the deep dark forest of uncertainty and instability of the rushed deployed systems. Trying to declutter and reach a stable stage where the order reigns over chaos, where the poor guy can finally sleep at night and the pager eventually goes silent for a while. At the end we'll be reaching the so-desired level of confidence to not be worried about experimenting, changing things and upgrading infrastructure.

Slides | Video |

2020

Radical

Infrastructure as Code

how to version changes and sleep soundly

2019

Skuola.net

How to Survive the Day

A bunch of pills about it.

Slides |

2019

PUG Roma

IT Metrics in Real Life

It's all about measuring, and that's just the easy part. The hard part is focusing on what really matters.

Slides | Video | Link

2016

PUG Roma

Performance Optimisation

Little introduction to different techniques useful to optimise and improve your website performance.

Slides | Video | Link

2013

IOVOX

Unit Testing

Books

I'm sharing the architectural and practical details of each step I took to make my websites disaster-proof while keeping my cloud spending on a tight leash (so you could do this too).

Curated list of great contents (articles, videos, books and exercises), tips and suggestion collected over the years as a software engineer, from junior dev all the way up to CTO.

It's all about measuring, and that's just the easy part. The hard part is focusing on what really matters.

Easy ways to boost your sales while making your users and the search engines happier

Education

2005 - 2007

Computer Engineering

University of Rome Tor Vergata

Degree Not Completed
2000 - 2005

Computer Science

High School

Certifications

Show more

References

  • I left the company where I directly report to Fabio more than one year ago and I'm still learning a lot of useful and profitable stuff, tools and technologies due to the experience I had with him and his staff. In addition to this he has a very persistent attitude and his mentorship is a great value for any professional who has the luck to work with him.

    Fabrizio Salmi Senior Network and System Administrator
  • Fabio was a great asset to my technical team from the outset. He possesses a solid and up to date technical understanding of web development, best practises and Agile methodologies and has a critical mindset when architecting solutions. A pleasure to work with and always keen to share his knowledge and promote inter-team learning.

    Dan Donegan CTO
  • I had the pleasure to work with Fabio when I started working on a challenging project with crazy requirements (FusePump's internal real-time tracking and reporting tool). I needed to expand my team and he stood out among the new hires, so I wanted to work with me. Fabio impressed me by his manner of carrying out his tasks with competency, accuracy and punctuality. His best strengths are the ability to quickly pick up on new technologies and/or frameworks he's not even ever heard about, and the fact that you'll never need to explain to him the requirements a second time. His coding is driven by genuine passion. Also, I shouldn't leave out the fact that I've never seen a developer cover their code with unit tests as much as Fabio does. Definitely a top of the game developer, and a friend.

    Samuele Artuso Team Leader
  • Fabio has a deep understanding of the platform, the language, its synthax and all the tricks you can take advantage of to solve unhandy situations: from a low-level perspective, he has skills like no PHP developer I've ever seen.
    Additionally, in the last 2 and a half years he made a really vauable experience with the symfony framework, which has been his daily basis for writing webapps here at DNSEE.
    He's also making experiments with new technologies, like Mongo, and in the last 2 years I've seen him turning into a really good PHP developer, after coming from the old PHP school.
    I would definitely hire him in my next team, as you'll always need guys like him during every kind of projects' lifecycle: when he works under a lead, his commitment is a goldmine.

    Alessandro Nadalin Team Leader
  • Working with Fabio is stimulating. He has great talent in the programming and development jobs.
    His excellent technical skill give him, and the team where is working, high speed development, and he is able to understand the problems related to a project development.
    Curious and passionate new technologies, Fabio like to find new way to solve the issues that have been entrusted.
    Deep knowledge of Internet, Fabio can follow the most difficult solution with high concentration and an overview of the problem.
    These quality give the opportunity to all the team to learn new techniques, and new ways to solve the daily issues.

    Francesco Contini Software Architect