Fabio Cantoni

Full Stack Developer & Geek Inside


Location

Barcelona, Spain

Skype

cover3k

Intro

What I am all about.

I AM A GENERALIST

My last project was a tool for the music industry, but I'm not a rock star developer.
In the past I took some ninjutsu classes, but I'm not a ninja developer.
I'd describe myself more like a generalist developer interested in improving my craft, creating beautiful code and acquiring new knowledge — not only related to programming.

I AM A MASTER OF HATS

For various years I worked on companies I co-founded and on freelance works, and those experiences gave me the ability to wear many different hats:

  • one day I was building the product, and the next I was configuring the server for it;
  • one day I was contacting and talking with people that could be interested in the product, and the next I was replying to support emails;
  • one day I was working remotely with my team thousands of miles away, and then I lived and worked with them under the same roof;
  • one day I was interviewing and hiring people, and then I had to lay them off (<​- this was the worst moment of all).

I had many days like these and they allowed me to grow much faster than I could have done otherwise.
I'm still learning every day, and I continue to enjoy the process.

I LOVE RUBY

Since the moment I discovered Ruby for the first time in 2006 I always loved its clarity and the ecosystem. That's also the reason I've been using it professionally ever since.
To give something back to the community I started and organized for 3 years a Ruby conference in Italy and some meetups. I didn't do it for the money — they were free or with a small price to cover the expenses — but instead to allow hundreds of people to meet and share their experiences with others.

I HAVE A LIFE

I love programming, but that doesn't mean that's the only thing I do 24/7.
When I'm not behind a text editor I like to travel, cook, go to classical concerts, meditate, work out, watch movies, read, and do other activities that help me to recharge and go back working with a fresh perspective.

Skills

Progress bars, anyone?
92%

Ruby on Rails

89%

Ruby

78%

CSS3

81%

HTML5

77%

JavaScript

69%

React

58%

React Native

83%

Linux

Experience

Yes. I've been around.
September 2018 – Present

Going

Staff Rails Developer

Remote

Going, formerly Scott's Cheap Flights, is a subscription service that sends out only the best international flight deals to more than 1.5 million subscribers every day.

I've joined the company to work on the new web platform that's been built with Ruby on Rails.

March 2018 – May 2019

CareerFoundry GmbH

Advisor in the Mentor Advisory Board

Remote

Every year CareerFoundry selects six among the best mentors of their courses who have exceeded expectations in the categories of "helpful", "encouraging" and "timely" but who also have a wealth of wonderful written feedback sent to the student and mentor teams.

I was chosen to fulfill this role in order to give them thoughtful feedback to improve the platform and the courses.

August 2017 – August 2018

NoviCap

Senior Rails Developer

Barcelona, Spain

NoviCap (TechStars Barclays 2014) is an online platform which allows Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) to access the capital locked in their long-dated invoices. NoviCap provides invoice finance in a fast, flexible, and transparent way while offering professional investors the opportunity to invest in a short-term asset yielding above-average returns.

On a daily basis I take care of improving the platform on both the backend (Ruby on Rails) and frontend (React).

Key projects I worked on:

  • Improved the analysis testing suite lowering their time from 25 minutes to 3 minutes and made them simpler to test
  • Added a way to recourse payments in order to retrieve the invested money from other financed invoices
  • Automated the checking of the validity of submitted documents and their recurring notification
  • Drastically lowered the amount of time spent every day by operations to submit payments by automatically export a payment file to upload on the bank website
  • Added some API endpoints and helped partners on their integration
  • Worked and improved the double entry accounting system that was based on an event driven architecture
May 2017 – May 2019

CareerFoundry GmbH

Web Development Mentor

Remote

CareerFoundry is the number one community for career development in tech. Since 2014, it has helped educate more than 27'000 people from 80 countries, improve their careers and change their lives.

As a mentor I helped more than 100 students during their journey to become Junior Web Developers through regularly reviewing exercises, code reviews and checking for fundamental understanding of concepts, occasional video calls to discuss the projects in depth and finally suggesting supplemental learning materials and personal insights in areas where students are struggling.

May 2014 – Dec 2016

Musikee

Co-Founder / CTO

Milan, Italy & Remote

Musikee is a platform to allow musicians and labels to involve their fans in promotional activities in exchange for rewards.

I mainly took care of the whole backend and API (following the JSON API spec) that integrated with an Angular SPA.

Apr 2014 – Sep 2014

DataNovo Inc

Rails Developer

Remote

DataNovo is a big data, analytics startup that provides predictions of future outcomes and actionable recommendations to help companies, legal practitioners, and stakeholders assess the strength of a patent.

It started as a pivot of TradeGig and I built 2 different applications to fetch and parse all 5 million US patents and trial documents from the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO), providing an internal API to connect them to the main application.

Oct 2012 – Apr 2014

TradeGig LLC

Co-Founder / CTO

Santiago, Chile & Remote

TradeGig was a service marketplace where people could put their skills for sale initially in exchange for an internal credit to barter for other services, and later for money.

It was accepted to participate at Start-Up Chile in the 7th batch.

I mainly worked on both the backend and frontend, using different technologies (Ruby on Rails, Elasticsearch, Braintree, Balanced Payments, and others)

Oct 2008 – Sep 2012

Neonisi Srl

Co-Founder / CEO

Milan, Italy & Remote

Neonisi was an Italian auction/e-commerce platform achieving almost 2 millions of unique items available to purchase (at that time eBay Italy had 13 millions).

It also integrated directly with 3rd party Dropshipping providers, eBay (through their API) and with any external e-commerce (through CSV files) in order to keep the catalog in sync without much effort.

I Co-Founded the company wearing so many hats, and working mostly on the Customer Development, Product Strategy, Customer Support, Team Management, Hiring, System Administration and developing the whole platform using Ruby on Rails and other technologies (Sinatra, Sphinx, Neo4j, Redis, MySQL, Beanstalkd and others). Plus mopping the floor and taking out the trash when leaving the office at night ;)

Education

Learn something every day.
2006 – 2009

Milano-Bicocca University

Computer Science

Milan, Italy
2001 – 2006

ITI L. Cobianchi

High School Diploma
Computer Science Specialization

Verbania, Italy

Organizer

To give something back.

2010 – 2013

Italian Ruby Day

The Ruby Day is the most important annual conference about Ruby in Italy.


2010 – 2012

StartuppaMI

Monthly meetup in Milan to connect developers, startups and investors.


2010 – 2011

Ruby Social Club

Monthly meetup in Milan for developers programming in Ruby.