Hacking the University

Who are you, and what do you do?

My short twitter bio goes on as: “Senior Systems Analyst SGUL, Open Data & geomobile, ex-PhD student at Imperial College. Dev of LiveRugbyApp. Choir singer, cheese maker, and rugby player.”

I find it pretty descriptive of what I am, especially about my inability to discard things I like doing.

As my job title suggests, I’m mostly a sysadmin. However, due to the peculiar structure we have at SGUL, I also do a good deal of development, especially R&D for new services and using new technologies. This comes from my experience in development and project management from both freelancing and previous work experiences.

For SGUL, I deployed our first mobile portal and contributed to the Open Source Molly Project upon which the portal is built. I’m currently working on our Open Data Repository, and trying to develop a set of tools to facilitate the setup of such repositories. I’ve also facilitated the setting up of our Current Research Information System (based on Symplectic Elements and E-Prints) and using it as a base to harvest research data. I’m currently helping our library to deploy their Library Search Tools.

As a mobile developer in my free time, I’ve also launched a now retired Android and iPhone app to follow Rugby World Cup and Six Nations games which got some flattering coverage on the international press.

I’ve always been fascinated by mobiles and “weak” infrastructures. I did research in the context of Delay Tolerant Networking, and I’m now a contributor to Taarifa, a geo-reporting and workflow management platform.

Who taught you how to do what you do?

I was 5 when I started copying BASIC code from the manuals onto my Commodore 128’s console. That was some time before I learnt how to read, and I was just doing it as I found the relationship about those signs on the keyboard and the resulting drawings or sounds fascinating. I think that says it all. I went on with having an Amiga 500 Plus, a 8086, 286, 486, and finally several Pentium, all of which allowed me to experiment with coding at home and at school, where I learnt some Pascal, COBOL, SQL, Java, and (shamefully :P) Visual Basic 6.

I was one of the early adopters of the Internet in my not-so-techy Southern Italian home town. I developed my first personal web-site in 1996 (when I was 14) with pure HTML - soon followed by learning JavaScript and CSS which were starting to get some traction at the time.

Upon enrolling to a Computer Science course at University of Bologna, I discovered the amazing world of functional programming with Scheme, but it wasn’t until I got time to play with C for the Operating Systems course - getting to use things like processes, pipes, named pipes, sockets, and modifying the OS Scheduler - that I was really captured by coding.

You never stop learning, but I tend to indicate the OS exam as the end of the “hard-core” period of my education in computer programming.

What tools do you use?

I’m generally pretty much tool-agnostic and I tend to select the set of languages, tools, and technologies, that best suit the project I’m working on.

On my desk at work I have 4 machines running: a Linux x86 Ubuntu (my main machine), a Windows 7, a Mac Mini, and a Solaris 10.

For system administration: CentOs, Bash shell scripting, Perl, VmWare Vsphere

Development tools: Vim, Git (I’m a convert from cvs), Eclipse, Xcode

Languages & Frameworks: PHP, Python, Django (and recently experimenting with Flask), Objective-C, Java

Mobile: Android, iOS

Describe your dream working environment.

I like places where you can experiment, be challenged, be rewarded in a human way. I don’t think that the need to get an always increasing amount of money has necessarily to be a part of it, but the feeling of appreciation by strengthening human and work relationships has. I think that academia is very close to my dream working environment.

I love to solve people’s problems and I’m lucky to be able to do so, working in a University. I also love the fact that I have the possibility to experiment with new ideas and technologies, thanks to the support of my managers and the enthusiasm of the users I get involved in such projects. I think that in academia there are lots of interesting people, and consider myself lucky to be able to interact with them very often.

The level of flexibility you can experience in a university environment is also another factor: provided you have a good drive to bring the projects forward, you can do that relatively when and where you prefer, and use the tools you repute best suited to the task.