Roberto Congiu’s Blog

July 2005 – Current

Data Services Engineer, Yahoo! Search Marketing Burbank, CA

As a Data services engineer I’ve been working on data processing/data warehousing. I design, write, guide through production and later troubleshoot massive ETL jobs in YSM’s data warehouse. Some feeds are in the order of 1Tbyte/day.

My first project was a distributed ETL framework for Yahoo! Data Warehousing called yETL that included several features like programmable processing barrier/conditions, delta processing and Map/Reduce distributed processing.

I’ve later been project manager for the migration of partner data feeds from the old pipeline architecture to the next generation software we’re using now. Responsabilities were end to end, from gathering requirements to organizing QA and control deployment. Partner feeds are external-faced and have a tight SLA.

April2004 – July 2005

Senior Software Engineer for Sendia Corporation, inc Santa Monica, CA

Lead Engineer for the BlackBerry WSFA client for SalesForce.com. The client is written in Java, leveraging part of the J2ME API and the RIM proprietary java libraries for the blackberry platform. The client has to work with several devices, each with different capabilities and a different set of APIs. The application has been engineered to be modular and easily expandable and supports different version of the RIM OS. This is achieved with careful use of design patterns (singleton, observer, factories).

The client dialogs with Sendia’s server side technology to keep the data on the device always synchronized with SalesForce.com. I manage a junior engineer, helping project management to write the specs for the new features and writing the engineering specs for the new client features. The BlackBerry client is the main platform for the product – the implementations for treo and pocketpc always implement the features after they’ve been implemented on the BlackBerry.

The architecture of the whole system is complex – with a synchronization server and a management console between salesforce.com and the handheld client. When a problem occurs, the client is almost always the starting point for troubleshooting so I also act as support engineer for our customer service department and for the sales department when there’s an important deal going on.

I also wrote an Over-The-Air installer that allows us to minimize the steps for downloading the right version of the application on all the combination of devices and carriers. The OTA installer has a server-side counterpart that I also wrote for Tomcat.

I also take care of the deployment procedures for the client and the OTA loader.

April 1999 – April 2004 Woodland Hills, CA

Senior Software developer for Alchemy communications, inc

My main responsability has been BigMailBox.com, a service from BigMailBox, inc, a Alchemy subsidiary, for which I am currently the only mantainer. I rewrote portions of it as needed, such as the mail parser. The previous code didn’t handle complex (nested) multipart attachment and would just work with ISO-8859 (Latin) encoding. Now it supports arbitrarily complex attachments and any encoding.

BigMailbox is a hotmail-like email provider which handles approximately 40,000 email domains and 2 million users. My duties:

Maintain and troubleshoot the front-end code, written in PERL, to satisfy the requests from the marketing department, coordinating the web artist work.

Modify the application server (custom application in C++) together with the DBA. Design and implement Oracle stored procedures to work in conjunction with the application server.

Troubleshoot problems in conjunction with BigMailbox customer service manager, find and eliminate bottlenecks.

I was also put in charge of a complete rewrite of the system but the project was canceled. By then, I had ported most of the backend to the architecture Jboss/Tomcat/Velocity/Struts.

I also wrote the POP3 interface (in C++).

My other contributions to the company:

Before I was employed, the company didn’t use any form of source control system (CVS).

I advised for an implementation, and I was put in charge of installing and mantaining the system, and to instruct all the other developers on its use. It is currently used for every project.

Design and implementation of a web-based reporting system for internal use, using J2EE (tomcat/cocoon/velocity/jboss handling XML and XSLT) to have the same report generated in excel and in html.

I also worked on the commerce system, mantaining debugging and expanding the code of the custom application server we use (C++)

Design, and implementation of a friend networking/dating site (similar to friendster) which was never launched. The system is written in PERL on the frontend and communicates with the application server using SOAP. I developed everything except the graphics and finished the project one week ahead of schedule (3 weeks instead of a month).

Design and implementation of several parts of a media portal. One of the parts I designed and developed is the media search engine. The portal has a server side and a client application for windows written in Visual C++.

Design and development of the backend part of a newsletter managing system (subscribe/unsubscribe) which is still currently used. Subscribers are in the order of the ten million. The backend is written in java, running on a Solaris system on Oracle9.

I worked in other smaller projects like troubleshooting and mantaining other company systems like the ad servers.

I also work on my own personal projects on my spare time. I love technology and I love keeping up to it. I’ve been a Linux user since 1996 and I am pretty good at Unix system administration. I’ve had a PalmPilot PDA ever since Palm was still US Robotics and programmed it using the GCC cross-compiler. I work on my own websites and try at home first any new technologies and frameworks that could help me at work. I own a laptop, an iPaq and a bluetooth phone and use wireless technologies (bluetooth and 802.11) on a daily basis.

March 1998-April 1999 Turin, Italy

Senior Software developer of the Italian co-operative group Arcipelago

Development of internet-intranet software

Consulting and teaching in several public and private boards

Development and installation of the company’s intranet

Development of the mail-to-fax gateway for the CSI (a pay service now available at http://www.alpcom.it)

Consulting on software development at CSI Piemonte (http://www.csi.it)

Designing and installing of firewalls

Nov 1997-Feb 1998 Cagliari, Italy

Software Developer at IS@C srl

Employed as CTO

Development and installation of network with firewall

Server installation and manteinance

Development of the web service ‘Intertour’, a tourist database on Sardinia

Developement of the company’s intranet on a ssl-secured site (https)

Design and installation of firewalls for customers

Teacher in advanced internet classes.

Web interface to the database by ‘Osservatorio Industriale della Sardegna’ (http://www.ossind.it), containing economic data about over 30.000 Sardinian companies.

Design and development of the web database http://www.obiettivo2.it, (sponsored by EU group TECLA to promote collaboration and partnership among companies in the EU).

Development of Visual C++ for internal information handling

High School Diploma in 1988 GPA: 3.8/4.0

MS equivalent in Electronic Engineering from Turin Polythechnic in March 1999 with an experimental thesis on securing email with PGP cryptography through writing a mail gateway server.

Course of studies in Computer Science: exams about Communication Networks, Software Engineering, Database, Computer systems design, Design of programming languages, Design of operating systems

Studying foreign languages; Sports: Traditional Karate, cycling, running; Photography;