Some bureaucratic details Link to heading

• company: Siter Srl
• contract: Italian NCLA, part time (25h/w)
• place: in-office - Pisa, PI
• start: December 2015
• end: August 2016

As a Backend Developer (12/2015 - 08/2016) Link to heading

Summary Link to heading

I have worked in Siter Srl as a Backend Developer. This company provides proprietary software for handling formal procedures to the local municipalities. The architecture of such proprietary software came from before Y2K, so nothing extremely interesting to share about that.

Given the really tiny size of the company and the extent of the project, I had the opportunity to become autonomous in just a few months and actively contributing to improve and maintain the rather stale codebase. In fact, the last thing I did, out of my initiative, was an attempt to unify the codebase of every product into a single one since the applications’ codebases were basically identical.

This is where my journey started, and I had the occasion to see how things shouldn’t be developed and maintained. This is where I started to understand why maintainability and code hygiene are assets and not liabilities.

Role & Responsibilities Link to heading

As a backend developer, I had the following responsibilities:

• maintaining the old proprietary backend software
• developing new “satellite” standalone executables that communicate with the backend software through the database
• provide first-level support to customers from the municipalities (both telephone and remote-desktop sharing)

Involved technologies Link to heading

Nothing special, consider we weren’t even using VCS fml:

• VB6 - as the proprietary backend software
• Java 7 - as one of the languages for the “satellite” executables
• C# .NET 4.0 - as one of the languages for the “satellite” executables
• MySQL, SQL Server, OracleDB - as the supported RDBMS of the proprietary software
• SOAP - as the main server-to-server communication protocol