Università degli Studi di Udine

Liceo Scientifico

Senior Vice President Of Technology at noon

Dubai, United Arab Emirates

As SVP of Technology of our Markeplace team, I am in charge of an amazing team of ~120 talented folks that span engineering, product, SRE, UX and QA -- our goal is to deliver an exceptional experience to both of our customers: consumers and sellers.
In my position, I set the direction of our team, drive the design of our system, grow the various tech teams and contribute from the trenches every now and then.

I joined Noon with a personal mission of creating opportunities in the region: my goal is to build an ecosystem in which consumers can access a huge, convenient and unique catalog, and where sellers can start, expand and refine their business. Creating opportunities has, and will always be, a very important personal mission for me, and I'm glad I found an organization that allows me to do so at a large scale.

Some of the projects I've been involved in:

-  rolled out credit card and bank transfer refunds, one of our customers' biggest pain points
-  drove the release of product & seller reviews / ratings, allowing customers to voice their opinion, and sellers to showcase their outstanding work
-  lead our seller store product, which allows sellers to create their own store on Noon, offering them a targeted channel to promote, advertise and grow their business
-  created an analytics even processor that currently ingests over 100 GB of data every day with a response time of ~300 microseconds per request
-  worked with other engineers in our organization to create a new template for our backend apps, using Pydantic & FastAPI
-  moved our development environment from an in-house baked solution to skaffold

- and a few more (upcoming) projects focused on empowering sellers and giving them a better opportunity at succeeding on our platforms.

Our stack is mostly based on Python, JS (node on the server), Go and MySQL, and applications run in containers orchestrated by Kubernetes.

noon

Senior Vice President Of Technology

As CTO of Namshi, my responsibilities involve scaling the team and setting its direction (both from a cultural and technical standpoint) and designing parts of our architecture, while contributing from the trenches from time to time.

Some of the key highlights include:

-  leading the migration our infrastructure from AWS to GCP, which allowed our architecture to find a more suitable standing ground in GKE (thus reducing complexity and operational toil), with the added benefit of reducing cost by 40%
-  implementing an analytics tracker that processes ~40M events a day (13B events in total, 1.7TB of data)
-  guided a small, extremely-skilled team through the rewrite of our catalog API, the service that serves most of our customer-facing traffic -- a project that managed to cut response times by 65%
-  lead moving one of our few SPOFs (search service) to an HA setup, and later to a managed solution

I also managed to drive significant contributions to the business; one that stands out was designing and leading the implementation of exchanges, a mechanism for our customers to exchange sizes (think an L for an M that doesn't fit) within 1-click: Namshi was one of the first retailers, worldwide, to roll out such a feature, with astonishing results such as a decrease in operational cost and improvement in customer satisfaction (+22% relative to our return process).

From an organizational standpoint, we transitioned from traditional homogeneous teams to a squad-like structure, where squads are responsible for verticals within the business and fully own the lifecycle of that vertical.
Along with that, I was responsible to grow a team that had been traditionally undersized -- the whole tech team has doubled, from 20/25 people to ~50, with important additions such as the InfoSec team, who now manages a public bug bounty program. Another key success was to turn our sysadmin team into an SRE one, spreading the SRE philosophy throughout the development squads.

Namshi.com

Chief Technology Officer

We have been pushing our architecture, based on microservices, to be one of the sharpest in the Middle East, one that is now completely running through containers on AWS, delivers fast responses on its frontends (70ms) and takes advantage of well-crafted HTTP APIs which are tested through continuous integration.

We have been pioneers of a few technologies / platforms simply because we are a company devoted to forward-thinking and experimenting: among the significant things we've put in production I always like to mention that we run on SPDY and that we have a fleet of Docker containers, orchestrated through Kubernetes, running our services.

The development team is contributing to our SOA on a daily basis, pushing new code to our production servers day after day: our team members engage in code reviews, discuss best practices of software design and write automated test to get us covered; they get the chance to work with some of the best development platforms out there (React Native / AngularJS / NodeJS / Symfony2 / Docker) so they always have an extra-push.

Builds of our systems run every time someone pushes new code to Github and Travis-CI notifies us if there is anything broken: we believe that good software design saves us from regretting decisions in six months, but automated tests save us every time we push new code to our production environment.

From a DevOps perspective, we configure our infrastructure through saltstack and run it on docker containers, orchestrated by Kubernetes on clusters of CoreOS machines in the cloud: deployments are done the chatops way, with hubot running on slack -- our engineers send a message and the bot executes a zero-downtime deployment for them, while our monitoring tools (New Relic, Sysdig and Graylog) ensure things are running smoothly.

Last but not least, we love opensource <a href="https://github.com/namshi">https://github.com/namshi</a> :)

VP Technology

As Head of Development, my duties include making our web infrastructure - foundation of an e-commerce company - function for a company of ~150 people.

The DevTeam at Namshi now counts 11 people from 7 different nations, from Senior Frontend Developers to Junior PMs, striving together to challenge the traditional concept of web development in the region: we are transitioning to a SOA architecture, using enterprise practices and patterns (from tools like BDD to frameworks such as Symfony2 or standards as the PSRs) and a stress-free working environment, as much as we can.

Besides handling the team, giving directions and guiding the choices for our infrastructure, I tend to look at processes and identify - in a pure lean way - bottlenecks and waste in our organization, wondering whether the tech team can help improving the efficiency of the company and the surrounding environment.

Namshi.com  -  Rocket Internet

Head of Development

Part of a team of 3 who are writing the first-ever book on OrientDB, a NoSQL document-graph database written in Java.

I took part in reviewing and adapting the table of contents after the initial brainstorming which was done before I joined, and I am currently involved in writing my chapters and continuously reviewing our work.

Manning Publications Co.

Author

Namshi is a venture launched by Rocket Internet in the GCC: I am managing a team of 9, directly reporting to the CTO.

As a head of application development, I oversee the development of Namshi from A to the Z, starting with planning the product and its development, preparing my team for the upcoming sprints and teaching how to write maintainable code that can be easily tested and refactored by ten other different people.

I am the supervisor of major and maintenance releases as well as reviewer of the code that gets included into our codebase: we are using a very lean approach, thanks to GitHub and the pull request mechanism, that help developers communicate with each other to understand how some specific code can be improved.

I'm also trying to get the team used to the new wave of PHP5.3+ software and practices, from dependency injection, automated testing to separation of concerns and so on: I introduced - but not yet completely implemented - behavioural tests through Behat - although we don't do BDD; we can effectively say that we are training juniors, intermediates and some senior developers with tools, patterns and practices they have never seen before.

Lead developer

I've been asked by the guys at HTML.it - the leading platform/reference for webdevelopment-related resources for webmasters in Italy - to write a few short posts in their blog, related to the PHP ecosystem, frameworks, REST and design patterns.

You can find my short posts at <a href="http://blog.html.it/author/alessandronadalin/">http://blog.html.it/author/alessandronadalin/</a>

HTML.it

Writer

After expanding our development team - we could count on more than 10 people between in-house developers and remote (regular) consultants - I acted as a lead for the team: I was responsible for the analysis, design and implementation of complex systems based on the RAD framework symfony 1.4.

In DNSEE, even though the fast pace and pressure of the traditional web agencies is very difficult to handle, we tried to deliver value following some practices of Agile development; as a leader, I shared my knowledge with the rest of the team: TDD, functional testing, sprint planning are some of the practices I have personally introduced the development team to.

During this period, we also had the chance to give presentations at international conferences about some of the work done in DNSEE: the most interesting project we had the time to work on there is Orient, a ODM for the NoSQL document-graph database OrientDB.

DNSEE  -  Interactive Thinking

Senior software engineer / Team lead

After doing some work for DNSEE with my previous company, I got a call from their CTO (Alessandro Lombardi) to be part of their development team: DNSEE was building a PHP software factory and I was the initial member of the team.

Back there, I was involved on a project based on Magento for one of our biggest clients, and after that, having the ability to decide which platform to use as a development stack, we focused on symfony 1.4: at that time, DNSEE was the only big italian web agency to use symfony.

Software developer

Ternaria has been my gym through the very early years of my career: started as a collaboration between 3 friends, it lasted for more than 2 years as a small web agency.

We used to work with bigger agencies and, given our back-at-that-time strong background with Joomla!, we mostly developed solutions based on this CMS.

It has been a very challenging experience, as I had to manage from A to the Z of a company, from finance to customer acquisition: it's during my time at Ternaria that I become passionate about conferences, after speaking at the 2009 italian PHP Day, which introduced me to concepts like automated testing, refactoring and TDD.

After leaving Ternaria, I was still involved - for several months - in the handover of projects and customer support.

Alessandro Nadalin

Alessandro Nadalin