So, What Have I Been Doing?
Seven years, a few job hops, one daughter, and a return to side projects.
Welcome to the first edition of Skewed Thoughts. I thought I’d start by sharing a bit of where I’ve been, what I’ve built, and what I’m hoping to rediscover.
So. Here we are.
It’s been 7 years since the last time I was able, and more importantly, willing, to do something tech-related outside of work (aside from tinkering with my homelab).
What have I been doing? Let’s rewind.
Seven years ago, I was streaming tweets about Christmas to a Raspberry Pi, using Spark and NLP to analyze which countries loved Christmas the most.
Why?
Because I wanted to get a better job abroad and grow in my career.
What happened?
I got the job.
Bank of America hired me in Dublin as a Data Engineer. Up until then, I was a big data jack-of-all-trades: spinning up clusters, writing jobs, choosing tech, with zero guidance. And it showed.
So I chose a big, structured company because that’s exactly what I needed.
There, I learned Agile, how to work in a big team, how to work in English, and how to properly use Scala. I went from knowing next to nothing to building a new framework that let the credit risk org spin up Spark batch jobs using just YAML.
But after a year, I was done. Bank pace is slow, and once I learned what I came for, I needed a change.
I joined Jet.com as a Senior Data Engineer. They were building a real-time streaming data platform, basically what I had started at BofA, but on steroids.
Things moved fast. Anything I merged went straight to prod. Any bug could wake up the person on call (sometimes me). At first, it made me cautious. Then I adapted.
In six months, I was designing new features, leading on-call, talking to stakeholders, and seeing my impact in real time, literally.
The war room buzz on Black Friday? Unforgettable. Some of the best engineers I’ve ever worked with, all focused on keeping everything running smoothly.
A year in, I was offered the Tech Lead role.
Then came a twist: Jet.com would be fully merged into Walmart.
I helped migrate Jet’s systems to Walmart’s stack. We moved from Nomad on Azure to a multi-cloud setup, Databricks on Azure, Dataproc on Google, Kubernetes for orchestration. I designed a system that could deploy all streaming jobs across any of those platforms with a single API call. Failover, hot/hot, you name it. Still the best work of my life.
I stayed for 3 years. I learned so much. Then Walmart decided to shut down the Dublin office, right as I was closing on a house in the suburbs to work remotely in peace.
No peace was granted.
I had to job hunt at the same time as dozens of other great engineers. I got some offers and joined Workday. I would’ve worked on massive-scale, multi-tenant Scala applications in the integrations org.
But it never clicked. Not the job, not the company. And then they announced a return to office.
Meanwhile, I’d started talking to a French startup I’d never heard of: Didomi. The role? Engineering Manager. Not the “sits-in-meetings-all-day” kind, the kind that shapes the data vision of the company, wears multiple hats, and codes when needed.
Fully remote from day one. I was sold.
At Didomi, I learned how consent management actually works. I dove into the legal requirements, designed the new system, hired the team, and got it to production. It took over a year, and it’s awesome.
In the meantime, I got married. I had a little girl.
And after 7 years in Ireland, we decided to move back to Italy. We love Ireland, but we also love watching her grow up surrounded by family. And Didomi made that move happen in days.
So… what have I been doing?
I took time to build a family, and a career.
And now I’m back to where I started, with a keyboard, an idea, and the urge to build something new.
I don’t know what exactly yet, but we’ll figure it out.
If you’re curious to follow along, whether it’s data, tech, or the messy middle, I’ll be here.