This page contains some of the most interesting software development projects I worked on during my professional career and spare time, including:

• Customer success stories and infrastructure projects at FarmHedge and freelance work.
• Scalable web-services and SEO at Groupon.
• Testing GPU and Parallel features at MathWorks.
• Real-time 3D animation and GPU computing from my PhD.

App factory @ FarmHedge – 2021

In 2020 FarmHedge signed two customers that needed a new app and dashboard to trade and communicate with their own customers. Their requirements were quite similar at the core. Also, we needed to migrate our existing customers to a newer, more powerful version of the system. Their core requirements also matched the ones of the two new customers. We decided to build a system for creating FarmHedge-based apps easily and in a scalable way.

More information on this project is available in this dedicated post.

Teraprod – 2020

Since my freelance work in 2009 I have been building and maintaining software for industrial production and automation. One application, in particular, is an ASP.NET web app written in C# and built for a masterbatch production plant in southern Italy in 2008. The company using the software has been growing in terms of the volume of transactions and data stored on the system beyond the software capabilities. In 2020 I redesigned and rewritten the app using a more modern tech stack. The new app, named Teraprod, is based on Angular and RESTful web services.

More info on the project can be found here.

Setting up our Data Warehouse @ FarmHedge – 2020

In 2020 at Farmhedge, we got to the point where the data we store has become an important asset for us and our customers. Our users ask us reports on their transactions on the system or statistics about their customers archived on our system and in the past we struggled to provide this type of information because the data was not easily accessible to us.

More info on this project is available on a dedicated post here.

FarmHedge Portal and mobile app @FarmHedge – 2017-2020

FarmHedge is a platform that connects farmers, suppliers and wholesalers/manufacturers. I redesigned the FarmHedge mobile app and built a new portal for suppliers through which new offers can be easily drafted and posted on the FarmHedge platform. I joined the company as a CTO and technical cofounder in 2018.

FarmHedge was among the finalist of the accelerator AgroInnovationLab 2018 out of 250+ other startups. After the accelerator program, FarmHedge successfully completed a trial in Austria and, in July 2018, three main Austrian suppliers started using the platform.

More info on FarmHedge here.

 

Goods UI & SEO @Groupon – 2018

I contributed to the generation of pages, content and indexing for SEO of Groupon’s goods pages – the goods e-commerce section of Groupon. I improved and streamlined brands support, aimed to the creation of indexable pages such as https://www.groupon.com/goods/apple/electronics.

 

Urgency Messaging @Groupon – 2016/2017

This project was entirely developed by a small engineering team based in Dublin, Ireland and I had the pleasure to be part of this proeject as a software engineer and then as a team lead.

If you visit any available deal on Groupon.com, web or mobile, you will see messages like “1,000+ viewed today“, “Selling fast!” or “45 viewers right now“.  Here are some examples extracted from the Groupon app on iOS:

These are real-time urgency messages produced by the  Urgency Messaging (UMS) API. We developed UMS API at Groupon using Spring Boot and Java 8. The API aggregates information coming from other Groupon internal services which are based on Apache Storm topologies consuming clickstream data.  The front-end was developed by specialised teams for Android and iOS, which are based in Palo Alto (CA), and desktop/mobile web, based in Chicago (IL).

Redesign Parallel Toolbox test infrastructures @ MathWorks – 2013

MathWorks supports GPU and distributed data structures for accelerating the computation of CPU or memory-intensive processes. Use cases include financial, astronomical or meteorological simulations and much more.

After joining the Cambridge office of MathWorks in 2013, I quickly realised that testing these features and reproducing distributed or GPU-intensive tasks for validation was an extremely complex and laborious task. This problem was due to the outdated tools and test infrastructure used for building new tests. I decided for this reason to design and heavily document a new design Object Oriented test infrastructure for those features. This resulted in a procedure to create new tests much simpler than before. This reusable, well-documented, set of tools I built for my team was without doubt one of the most successful projects during my experience at MathWorks.

BehaveRT – 2009

The following video is the graphical outcome of the thesis project for my Master’s degree in Computer Science at the University of Salerno (2009).  A mix of real-time computer animation, parallel computing (GPU) and classical music results in an explosion of moving objects and colours. For sources and executables, please visit the BehaveRT Github page.

 

Lump 3D videogame – 2008

Again, during my Master’s at the University of Salerno I had a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity: develop a videogame as a final test for a University class. I invented the “swarm-based” game concept:

Fish school simulation – 2011

I developed a C++ library to create real-time simulations (BehaveRT) and one of its examples of usage is depicted in the following video. The publication that backed this project allowed me to spend one year at Princeton University as Research Collaborator.

FishFOV – 2012

During an interdisciplinary project, I developed a ray-casting engine to simulate the field of view of fish swimming in groups. I added some graphics and music and this is the result:

 

3D Animation – 2005

Not much related to software development, the following video shows my first (and last) 3D Studio Max experience with animation. More 3D  images on my Flickr account.