Marco Cecconi
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CV
Talks
Writings
Outreach
Projects
About me
I am looking for jobs that challenge me in positive ways. What delights me are complex problems and
large sites, with many users and page views.
I speak about software architecture at conferences in Europe and Asia. In my spare time, I blog about my
crazy side projects and give a hand in the community through initiatives like Andela, a company that
provides work and mentorship to African developers.
Leaving a positive footprint is important to me.
I earned my chops on a ZX Spectrum, which I love to bits, and I am entirely self taught. I love learning stuff
and practicing my trade. Whatever the coding topic, it's probably something I'd love to chat about.
Employment History
CEO and Founder
Intelligent Hack
2019–today
I built a software consulting business supporting start-ups, scale-ups and established company modernzie and
scale their business and product to support large loads and numbers of users
I started as a solo consultant and built a business of 12 people. Some of our customers are companies with
approximately 100 million users processing billions of transactions per week.
azure
dotnet-core
redis
sql-server
linux
docker
devops
bootstrap
Engineering Manager
Toptal-
Totpal is the world's leading remote work force company. We enable the top 3% developers to work for the
best companies remotely.
First Engineering Manager to join the company, and now the first Technical Product Manager. I work with the
CEO, CTO and VP of Engineering to create a great engineering department, with a fantastic culture, great skills
and top-notch code quality. In addition to producing and coding full time, I speak at various conferences and
attend community events to promote remote work and our great engineering culture.
postgres
ruby
redis
Full stack developer
Stack Overflow-
elasticsearch
linux
google-cloud-compute
typescript
python
Stack Overflow is one of the global top 30 web sites, and the most important destination for developers
worldwide. It currently has 1.2 billion page views per month, and has over 13,000,000 questions.
“Valued associate” in the core team taking care of new development and maintenance of the main Stack
Overflow site and its meta site, all the network sites, and various other things like apps, etc.
Besides programming and performance tuning, I also contribute by speaking at various conferences and
attending community events, like job fairs, as a representative of Stack Exchange.
Features that I've done solo or significantly contributed to:
Help Center
Internationalization of the site
New Navigation
Developer story
Winterbash 2016
sql-server
asp.net
redis
elasticsearch
linux
haproxy
windows
c#
Team leader
Trayport-
Trayport is the European leader in software for commodity trading, in particular for energy, coal, emissions and
oil.
I lead the development and maintenance of a series of large .Net projects such as our pre-trade, real time risk
application, Trayport EMA Gateway.
EMA Gateway was a back-end system validating trader actions against a set of complex rules in real time. All
the rules were managed centrally by a third party via a web interface. The application was based on WCF
services and was a low-latency system (7ms latency on trades).
architecture
nunit
tdd
mspec
microsoft
c#-4.0
wcf
ndepend
web-services
fxcop
moq
c#
asp.net-mvc-3
sql-server-2008
autofac
resharper
visual-studio-2010
ncrunch
redgate
stored-procedures
entity-framework
Solutions Architect
Sophos-
Sophos is UK's most prominent anti virus developer and enterprise security vendor.
My work at Sophos consisted in providing technical and architectural leadership for a large part of the web
presence, hands on development and third level support.
The main Sophos web application was built using Sitecore on a service oriented architecture with WCF web
services. The application was load tested to support 1 million registered users and thousands of active
browsing users. Since it was deployed, the application has resisted multiple attacks by malicious hacker groups,
such as Lulzsec and Anonymous. The system included a bespoke product credential system and a bespoke
secure single-sign-on API.
agile
scrummaster
asp.net-mvc-2
architecture
sitecore
soa
tdd
wcf
perl
c#-3.0
mysql
fxcop
linux
typemock
sql-server-2008
stored-procedures
security
Senior Architect
FullSix-
I supported this European web agency from a 70 people start-up to a 700 people IPO'd company first as a
senior developer and then as an architect running multi-country projects and building web development
teams.
I worked on any major platform, supporting creating the web presence for world-wide famous brands such as
The Coca-Cola Company, Heineken, Airbus, Ferrero, Kitchen-Aid, American Tourister, J&B, and many others
such as national newspapers and telephone companies.
c#
php
perl
sql-server
mysql
java
oracle
Community
Talks
I have given many talks over the past five years in front of thousands of people. A full list of my talks is
available. For example,
DotNext Moscow
DotNext is the premier Russian conference on the .Net ecosystem. I have two main room talks, one about the
architecture of Stack Overflow and the other about the optimization of our tag query service, from SQL to
CUDA.
DotNext Helsinki
DotNext Helsinki is a small extension of the main Moscow conference held at the wonderful Microsoft Nokia
headquarters. I gave a small audience version of the architecture of Stack Overflow talk.
JSConf Asia
JSConf Asia is one of the biggest developer conferences in Singapore. I talked about the architecture of Stack
Overflow to a few hundred enthusiastic developers.
Writings
I am active as a blogger and on the Stack Exchange network. As a blogger, some of my post were featured on
the home page of Hacker News and received good feedback.
Some popular blog posts:
I built a hardware RNG for Christmas
I don't love the single responsibility principle
In the Stack Exchange network I wrote many highly upvoted (100+) posts, both prior and during my tenure as a
Stack employee.
Quick unix command to display specific lines in the middle of a file?
Let’s improve our site navigation
Relational Database Design Patterns?
What really allows airplanes to fly?
Random record from a database table (T-SQL)
Outreach
For three years now I've held a mentorship position at Andela
The Andela mentorship connects Western mentoring developers with African mentees. I am very happy to help
people in developing countries improve their skills as knowledge can and should be freely donated for the
betterment of all, especially for those who have less opportunities.
I have been writing up some of my algorithms and data structure lessons as ongoing blog posts.
Data Structures for Andela: Iterators (part 1)
Data Structures for Andela: Iterators (part 2)
Data Structures for Andela: Stacks
Projects
Programming is my job but also my passion. I work on computer and technology related projects in my spare
time all year round. Here are a few of my recent ones.
Blasteroids
Blasteroids is an 80's arcade space shoot-em-up, adapted to modern times. It's still an early alpha as the game
is missing features, however it is fully playable and fun! The game is written in vanilla JavaScript. It works only
on desktops.
My homebrew computer
I wanted to understand how transistors are assembled to make gates and how gates are assembled to make
usable computer parts. I am attempting to build a computer from scratch and blogging about it.
z80
z80 is, unsurprisingly, a z80 emulator library, written in C# using TDD. I am a huge fan of this CPU and its
assembly language and developing it was a pleasure.