Working in Extra Red

Some bureaucratic details Link to heading

  • company: Extra Red Srl
  • contract: Italian NCLA, full time
  • place: multiple
    • before 2020: in-office - Pontedera, Pisa, PI
    • after 2020: full-remote - Cascina, Pisa, PI
  • start: September 2018
  • end: May 2021

As a Software Engineer (09/2018 - 05/2021) Link to heading

Summary Link to heading

I have worked in Extra Red Srl as a Software Engineer. At the time, Extra Red was mainly a consultancy company with some internal projects to enhance the internal know-how. I worked on both consultancy and internal projects and I saw a lot of projects compared to the time I spent there: at the end of this page you can find a dedicated section to know more about these projects.

Here is where I feel I switched from a junior level to a mid level, if I were to gauge my seniority and confidence in my skills. If I was able to find the jobs I’ve found, it’s also thanks to these 2+ years here!

Role & Responsibilities Link to heading

To summarise, my responsibilities have been the following:

  • Developing and maintaining features for various clients
  • Participate in task estimation and scrum meetings
  • Contributing to (some) architectural decisions in medium-sized projects
  • Developing small-sized applications in full autonomy
  • Discovering unknowns in specific technologies
  • Supporting clients to use the technologies we suggested as consultants
  • Mentoring more junior profiles
  • Sharing knowledge I gained during explorations

Involved technologies Link to heading

The amount of tech used is rather wide since I participated in multiple projects:

  • Java 7 and 8 - as main programming languages
  • MariaDB and Oracle - as RDBMS used in the projects
  • Apache Camel (both XML and Java DSL) - for the ESB message routing definition
  • JBoss EAP - as the runtime of the Camel-based middleware
  • Fuse + Karaf - as another runtime of the Camel-based middleware
  • Openshift 3 w/Jenkins - as the runtime implementing the CI of the IoT project
  • Spring Boot - as the go-to framework for the CRUD applications
  • CDI - as another IoC framework
  • Jenkinsfile - as the pipeline definition
  • Docker (including defining docker images) - for the CI of the IoT project
  • Hibernate - as the go-to ORM for the CRUD applications
  • ActiveMQ - as the go-to messaging system
  • GitLab - for VCS
  • Quay.io - as an internal Docker image registry
  • Python and VB.NET - miscellaneous support

What I did Link to heading

In this company my work included:

  • Contributing in a CRUD application for an e-commerce project
  • Contributing in a CRUD application for a law project
  • Contributing to a research project for agriculture
  • Developing features for a middleware in a luxury company
  • Assisting a handover for a Python backend for another e-commerce project
  • Developing a standalone application for optimising the movements of an industrial machine
  • Reverse-engineering a backend application for a cloud-ready temperature-tracking camera
  • Developing and defining the CI of a cloud-first IoT project
  • Contributing to a backend project for a highway company
  • Developing features for a middleware in a banking company
  • Assisting a senior consultant of Openshift for a luxury company

Some of them sound gigantic, but they’re not. If you want to know more about some of the projects let me know and I can create a dedicated post or page about it.