Resume

Job skills

Systems analysis and design, development, small team leading

Industry sectors

Graphics, Video, Internet, Scientific, Telecom, Banking

Operating Systems

• MacOS X
• iOS
• Linux / FreeBSD
• Some Android
• Some Windows

Programming languages

• Objective-C (20+ yrs.), Swift (1 yr.)
• C / C++ (25 yrs.)
• Java (8 yrs.)
• SQL (9 yrs.)
• Shell script (10 yrs.), JavaScript (6 yrs.)

Tools

• Apple Xcode
• Apple Quartz Composer
• Eclipse
• Standard Unix development tools (make, gcc, gdb, …)
• Apache / Tomcat
• CVS / Subversion / SourceSafe / PVCS

Technologies

• Cocoa, Cocoa Touch
• OpenGL, Core Video
• Sockets, TCP/IP, Node.js
• Agile & Extreme Programming, JUnit
• RDBMS (MySQL, Oracle)
• RMI, XML-RPC / SOAP, J2EE, DOM

Formats

• Quicktime
• JSON, XML
• SVG, PDF
• HTML

Spoken languages

• Italian (native language)
• English (fluent)
• Spanish (fluent)
• Dutch (basics)

We’re making the news! Well, no, not in that sense… But now, a few hundred thousands users are enjoying a news app Paolo has worked on – or aren’t they?

4 years of rock’n roll! Freelancing, especially in a exploding environment like mobile applications, can be a lot of fun!
Paolo has worked on more than 50 apps, many for internal use, most of them first versions, some didn’t make it after two years, but still, a lot has been learned, and all added to the experience.

Video is the new frontier for high-performance computing, so Paolo has been the evil mind behind Clonwerk’s application suite, aimed at fulfilling broadcast stations’ need for high quality real-time graphics production. Yes, Sony hadn’t been enough, there’s still some damage to do…
Plus, now, everyone has one more person to blame about how lame TV has become!

Paolo has worked on the port to Intel processor and future updates of the Mac client for the well-known (if you’re a Windows corporate user, that is…) remote access packages (Presentation Server/Metaframe & Access Essentials).

Paolo was working on a complete system dedicated to professional broadcasters: from tape acquisition, to video editing, to archiving, to final on-the-air broadcast, the product aims to be a one-stop integrated solution at an affordable price.
OK, good sales pitch, isn’t it? And I wasn’t even reading the brochure…

Paolo has worked on the GUI of softwares aimed at sound editing for the professional movie industry.
One of the products, developed and used in its original form in the all-Kiwi “Lord Of The Rings” trilogy, is described here. The other, for the overdubbing market, is here
After that, having failed all subsequent interviews because of lack of interest in either rugby or cricket, he has returned to Europe.

Paolo has worked on some fundamental classes of a new media asset management application with a revolutionary visual interface for the consumer market to be published.

Paolo has recently come back to 3D graphics, one of his first loves: once again, the fact that OpenGL is NOT Object Oriented, and that it has little liaison with his beloved Cocoa, bothers him to no end.
He then decides to found and maintain an (oh so trendy!) open source project for a library to simplify the introduction to OpenGL on the Mac OS X platform.
The project, featuring both basic and advanced techniques for 3D visualization, is hosted here.

Paolo, as any mortal being on this planet that has an email address since more than 30 seconds, is fed up with “unsolicited (junk) e-mail”, better known as “spam”: after a unsatisfactory research for cross-platform solutions with a reasonable success rate, he has decided to build one himself.
And then, PostArmor was born! A free-/shareware application to process e-mail while still on the server, and automatically filter out junk e-mail. Amazingly enough, the application has been reviewed on many on-line magazines, most notably on the well known “TidBITS” on Nov, 2003.

In order to make artists’ life worse than it normally is, and allow them to completely miss the deadlines with someone else to blame, Paolo follows the development of applets & plug-ins for standard applications (Quark XPress, Adobe Illustrator, InDesign, Photoshop, …) for the management & production phase of adverts, custom-tailored for the Yellow Pages environment.

Interactive Yellow Pages advert editor

(JavaScript – SVG / PDF)

Pushing unknown and apparently useless technologies is Paolo’s favorite task: he has then developed a working prototype of an interactive editor based on the scriptable SVG format, capable to edit a complete set of pages from a Yellow Pages book within a normal browser.

Writing thousands of letters is a boring task, and outsourcing to India isn’t a sensible solution: Paolo has led the team that followed the porting, maintenance and extensions for a tool to automatically print custom letters, merging DB contents with graphical elements. The tool was based on OpenStep,
and used its Display PostScript capabilities extensively.

MacOS X technologies / XML specialized parser (C / C++ – Mac OS X – OpenGL)

A new star is born, a Unix with a nice and consistent GUI: Paolo led the team that conducted an evaluation and testing of different MacOS X technologies, with a special attention to XML parsing and OpenGL implementation.

Ikraft (Objective-C – WebObjects – Oracle DB)

When you try to hide the fact that you’re wasting your time playing online games, it’s better if you do it right: Paolo has worked on some components of this web-based time & expense management system, bringing his contribution to this major WebObjects development inside the company.

Huethig portal (Rechtsforum) (Java – XML/XSLT – WebObjects – FrontBase SQL DB)

Lawyers are possibly the least useful breed on Earth, but they need to be educated at it: Paolo has followed the general set-up of the portal site for law students, and was responsible in particular for the team developing the communication tools (message board, news board…), using the WebObjects technology to achieve a unique look-and-feel for these widely diffused way of communicating between groups.

We all know Japanese don’t think the same way than Western people, and this is no exception: Paolo has followed a project for extension and maintenance of a pagination system for a well-known Japanese company. Based on NeXTSTEP’s Display PostScript technology, the set of applications achieved a unique degree of accuracy and match between representation on screen and actual printout. At least, this was the intention: those little drawings on the pages looked all the same…

Graphical front-end, PDF & XML-based, for custom pagination system (C / C++ – Windows NT / Mac OS X Server – Oracle DB)

Working on the apparent success of the previous system, Paolo has set up the foundation for its successor: the resulting development was complete and functional, and has been the test bed for a set of relatively new technologies like PDF and its XML-based equivalent SVG. Obviously, it has been discarded as soon as possible.

Money is a fascinating subject for everyone: asked by a financial institution, Paolo has developed from scratch a full-fledged application in Java to work both as an independent tool to handle personal finance (bank accounts, credit cards, etc.) and as a front end to public stock trading services to manage and evaluate shares and currencies.

Warning: some obscure acronyms ahead! Paolo has collaborated to the extension and maintenance of a specific application to handle communication between a large corporate DB (over 2 millions records) and a cellular network’s HLRs for one of the largest European mobile telecom providers.
An extension for IN capabilities has been developed, with communication between an Oracle DB and a Java app through CORBA standard protocol.

Customer Care processing for payments (C / C++ – Digital Unix – Oracle)

For the same company, Paolo has followed a large part of the development of an automatic system to progressively disallow customers the use of the network, preventing frauds, based on data coming from the invoice & payment system. The extension he proposed to automatically blackmail non-paying customers when caught phoning their mistresses was not approved.

Paolo developed, for this German company specialised in cutting edge graphics, a special driver for large format printing plotters. The development included modifications and extensions to a full-fledged PostScript interpreter (GhostScript) with special algorithms (dithering, partitioning, etc.)
for use with large format printing.

Microcontroller-based (Motorola 68HC11, SGS ST6) circuits for industrial and home applications Hardware/Software devices for generic stepper motor

For the same company, Paolo has developed special hardware / software combinations to drive their custom-made machines in production.

Special software, installed at a furniture producer’s selling points, to easily build perspective views for potential customers and produce at the same time a component list for the order.

PSPlot / CutXtra – Driving software for drafting and vinyl cutting plotters (C / C++ – MacOS – PostScript)

A very specialised software, very popular in the signmaking industry, to couple off-the-shelf graphical applications (generally based on PostScript-like formats) with cutting plotters. The software has sold over 1000 copies in Europe, overseas and in Asia.

Facile! – Driving software for industrial machines – 2D custom CAD software for graphical industry (C / C++ – ISO G-code – laser & waterjet – 2 & 3D milling – MacOS)

Highly custom-tailored versions of the cutting plotter software.

Utilities for graphical industry (format translators, extension modules (plug-ins) for standard software, etc., C / C++ – MacOS / DOS)