Namecheap, Inc

In my role as Director of the Namecheap Cloud Department, I lead and manage four highly skilled teams, comprising a total of 40 talented individuals. My primary responsibilities encompass people management, budget oversight, stakeholder engagement, and the strategic direction of technical decisions to ensure seamless functionality within the department.

Director of Cloud

As an Engineering Manager, I began by overseeing a team of 6-7 individuals, which subsequently expanded and was divided into various teams, each specializing in distinct areas such as frontend development, DevOps, and infrastructure management. My primary responsibility as an Engineering Manager was to ensure the effective coordination and execution of projects, fostering a collaborative and productive work environment. This included:

- Team Leadership
- Project Management
- Cross-Functional Collaboration
- Technical Direction
- Performance Optimization
- Stakeholder Communication

Engineering Manager

EasyWP is a WordPress managed hosting platform built on top of the latest containerization and cloud technologies (Kubernetes, Docker, CoreOS, Openstack, Ceph). My roles in EasyWP are multiple. Product vision, agile product management, container infrastructure creation and maintenance, design.

EasyWP Product Owner

wpXtreme Inc

wpXtreme is a true app store for WordPress, the most widespread Content Management System. My role in wpXtreme is to build the product giving the long term vision to the rest of the team. I manage the development with agile methodologies and I plan all the actions around the final product; I'm also responsible about the communication  strategies.

Ceo & Founder

Saidmade Srl

I've founded Saidmade with the aim of supporting companies improve their online presence. Saidmade has been for years one of the most known communication companies in Italy and one of the first mobile applications developer.

Hurricane Media Srl

Software and System Engineer/Co-Founder

Softech Srl

In Softech Srl I had different tasks: web developer, system engineer, security manager.

Web Developer / System Engineer

Fondazione S. Carlo

I've managed the Unix system infrastructure of Fondazione San Carlo and I've been the person in charge for R&D.

Unix System engineer

ePlanet Spa

In ePlanet I was the person in charge for security and system maintenance. I've been involved in different projects and worked with some big italian companies (HP, Fastweb, etc).

Edp manager

Director of Cloud at Namecheap | 🤓 Author of The Hybrid Hacker, a newsletter about Engineering Management, Leadership, Career Growth and Productivity

I've spent 25+ years diving deep into technology, building businesses, and leading high-performing teams of Engineers. I try to condense all this experience in my newsletter and share it with my 30,000+ subscribers.

My main goal is to help other Engineers and Leaders grow and avoid mistakes I made in my career, through sharing:

🔧 Practical advice on how to grow from Engineer to Engineering Manager or Leader
📚 Personal stories about how I grew from Individual Contributor to Director
🎨 Easily understandable articles enriched with visuals to simplify complex concepts

If all of this makes sense to you, join 20k+ subscribers at: https://hybridhacker.email

Nicola Ballotta

Pluralsight

Producing software engineering video courses as an independent Pluralsight author.

https://www.pluralsight.com/authors/james-willett

Courses Published:

* Spring Certified Professional: Introduction to Spring and Core Configuration - https://www.pluralsight.com/courses/spring-certified-professional-introduction-spring-core-configuration

* Web3: The Big Picture - https://www.pluralsight.com/courses/web3-big-picture

* Karate Fundamentals - https://www.pluralsight.com/courses/karate-fundamentals

Pluralsight Author

Led diverse DevOps and Platform Engineering teams to transform the software development lifecycle at SAP Concur. Developed advanced automation tools, refined CI/CD processes, and introduced infrastructure improvements that minimised downtime and accelerated delivery. Acted as a technical leader, mentoring teams and fostering collaboration to drive innovation in developer experience and operational excellence.

Principal Software Engineer

Managing a talented team of software engineers in the development of highly concurrent, robust and distributed cloud-based expense audit solutions

Software Development Manager

- Work in a fast-paced fully Agile (SCRUM) environment, with a devops approach.
- Currently working on a project that involves performance testing of microservices hosted on AWS architecture using the Gatling load test tool with custom code written in Scala
- Previously developed and implemented a mobile automation testing framework written in Java utilising Appium
- Making use of Elastic Search (Kibana) and New Relic to monitor production applications health, customising dashboards as required

Senior SDET

SAP Concur

Using Scala, Akka & Kubernetes to leverage Big Data and Machine Learning to build a system that automates customer's expense reports with no manual intervention

Software Design Engineer

Worked on the creation of a new BDD focussed automation framework to test the 'Oil Operator’s Workbench' platform, a highly feature-rich and complex bespoke WPF application. The test framework was built in C# using the White Framework from TestStack, with SpecFlow used to implement the BDD aspect.

Automation Test Engineer (role with QAWorks)

QAWorks

Responsible for implementing performance and automation testing frameworks on client sites

Senior Technical Test Engineer

Vitality UK

• Lead consultant responsible for managing the work streams of 7 other consultants on a variety of performance, automation and functional testing projects.

• Designed and Implemented the performance testing proposal for a brand new native iOS application, using a combination of Jmeter for the backend testing in conjunction with Xamarin Test Cloud for automated testing on real devices.

• Wrote custom C# applications to facilitate the automated creation of complex test data by leveraging exposed Web APIs.

• Designed bespoke, realistic performance load test scenarios that can be customised by any business user by changing a few of the input parameters.

• Diagnosis, analysis, troubleshooting and resolution of performance bottlenecks identified across the complex environment infrastructure

Performance Test Manager (role with QAWorks)

accesso

• Lead Test Engineer responsible for planning, delegating and delivering all testing activities across a range of virtual queuing products.

• Built multiple automation frameworks from the ground up that use Selenium Webdriver to drive tests across a continuous integration approach (TeamCity and Jenkins).

• Automated testing of RESTful APIs using DSLs such as rest-assured.

• Designed performance test framework and developed numerous complex test scripts with Apache Jmeter.

• Developed and configured UNIX bash script to dynamically spawn multiple load generators on Amazon Web Services, with Jmeter installed, and run performance tests with up to 100,000 virtual users.

• Created performance test plans with comprehensive detail of all testing activities including volumetric analysis, test scenario details and test results design.

• Managed key stakeholders to board room level with regular presentations of testing status updates and test results.

• Credited with identifying multiple performance bottlenecks in existing systems, leading to major improvements in transaction response times and system capacity.

• Delegation of testing activities to other team members and management of the entire testing process across multiple work streams.

Lead Performance & Automation Test Engineer

Liberty Group

•	Worked as a test Lead on a global performance testing programme to migrate the existing local data centres for various countries into one of three Regional Data Centres

•	Worked on the data centre migrations for Singapore, Thailand and Brazil. Attended the offices in each country onsite and gathered performance volumeteric, system architecture, environment details and project planning data first hand.

•	Created detailed peformance test plans in coherent format that included information on script / business process coverage, scenario design, volumeteric assumptions, test data requirements and test result design.

•	Managing the activities and schedules of a performance testing team of up to 5 SQS consultants, in addition to working closely with client personnel in Sao Paulo, Bangkok, Dublin and Singapore.

•	Utilized various project management tools, including MS Project 2010, to plan key delivery dates and resource requirements with complex constraints for each country. 

•	Working with a wide range of protocols utilizing the LoadRunner v11.5 performance testing tool including; Web (HTTP/HTML), Citrix ICA, RDP and Oracle Forms

Performance Test Lead (role with SQS)

SQS-UK

Summary of client placements:

•	Performance Test Lead at Liberty International (November 2012 - May 2013)
•	Performance Test Consultant at Bupa (November 2012)
•	Performance Test Consultant at Irwin Mitchell (August 2012 - September 2012)
•	Performance Test Lead at Specsavers (July 2012 - August 2012)
•	Performance Test Lead at Unilever (May 2012 - July 2012)
•	Performance Test Consultant at The Co-Operative Group (February 2012 - May 2012)
•	Citrix Performance Test Consultant at Unilever (December 2011 - February 2012)
•	Citrix Performance Test Consultant at Gala Coral Group (November 2011 - December 2011)
•	Performance Test Consultant at WM Morrisons (October 2011 - November 2011)
•	Functional Test Consultant at Gala Coral Group (August 2011 - October 2011)
•	Performance Test Consultant at WM Morrisons (June 2011 - August 2011)
•	Performance Test Consultant at Unilever (April 2011 - June 2011)

Performance Test Consultant

Bupa

•	Worked on the project to deliver the Citrix performance testing of the ‘Online Claims’ application

•	Executed stress test of the application and supplied performance tuning recommendations to the client based on analysis of the results

•	Created comprehensive performance test results report including key observations and detailed application performance metrics

•	Worked in an Agile environment with daily SCRUM meetings

Performance Test Consultant (role with SQS)

Principal Engineer @ SAP 🔹 Pluralsight Author 🔹 Career, Coding & Content Tips for Software Developers

For my first ten years in software, I was a total failure.

I got stuck in a job as a video game tester 🕹️ - kidding myself that I was "living the dream" getting paid to play games all day.

In reality I was depressed, earning minimum wage, and neglecting my potential.

I was desperate to land a job in software development.

But my lack of confidence, dedication and knowledge meant I had "NO CHANCE" (like Vince McMahon).

Then one day, a mundane assignment from my manager changed my life.

My task was to create a "video tutorial", to teach some bug tracking software to other testers.

The tutorial sucked (I'd never created one before, and this was loooong before YouTube was a thing).

But something lit up inside me.

The process of creating a video:

• Writing a script
• Recording the content
• Editing and adding effects 

... it all just resonated with me.

Eventually I left my job as a games tester.

I landed a job as a regular software tester (I'll spare you the details).

I worked hard to improve my coding skills, started writing test automation code, and absorbed knowledge from devs surrounding me.

But the KEY thing I did?

I kept making videos.

They still sucked (mostly).

But slowly... they didn't.

They got better. They became useful. 

For the first time in my career, I was also getting noticed.

It's incredible how much even basic video and content creation will make you standout at work. Most engineers fail to appreciate this.

Creating videos is the sole-factor that has supercharged my career 💪

Despite being a distinctly average coder, I went from manual software tester to principal software engineer in under 3 years.

And I owe everything solely to content creation.

But do you want to know the best thing?

I can show you how to do the same. 

I can teach you skills that will change your career, prospects and life.

You don’t have to be "artistic" or "creative" or indulge any other self-limiting believe. 

You just need to use the skills you already have as a developer. Your ability to:

‣ Observe
‣ Learn 
‣ and Iterate.

I’m constantly sharing advice related to content creation, software development and career progression on my channels and weekly newsletter.

Follow me or send a connection request, and I’ll help you on your journey  💪

taplio

The Battle

Nicola Ballotta

James Willett

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