About me
Hi there, I’m Pasquale and I work as a software engineer, mainly focused on back-end technologies. In my leisure time I love spending time with my family and I enjoy travelling and riding my bike.
I fell in love with Computer Science when I was around 9 years old, and I started my career when I was 17, working as a freelancer.
In 2001, I decided to enroll at Bachelor’s degree course in Computer Science at Università di Studi di Napoli Federico II. That was great, it allowed me to better understand the theory behind coding and also get in touch with other hundreds interesting topics. Among many, Operating Systems course took my heart, and I decided to dedicate to that topic my final course dissertation work. I joined ICAR-CNR (High Performance Computing and Networks Institute) for around one year and I came up with an algorithm to speed-up jobs scheduling in Grid Computing environments. My dissertation paper (which I lost during too many house moves) was titled “Design, development and test of an alorithm to extend the Gang-Matching model and support multiple hypothesis of co-allocation”.
In 2008, after my Bachelor’s degree I took a pause from University and worked as system administrator for ICAR-CNR, but after 6 months I felt I wanted to proceed with my studies, then I quit the job and enrolled at Master’s degree course in Computer Science, still at University of Naples Federico II.
Master’s degree course focused on research topics, which I maybe would have found hard to apply in my future everyday job but, on the other hand, they gave me a different perspective about computational complexity and the mathematical aspects behind it which I think helped and made the difference several times during my career. I never regretted my decision of speding some years to complete my accademic education.
My Master’s degree dissertation work was in Bioinformatics, I needed to find a method to identify pieces of Human genome which could have been subject to natural selection. It was not easy, I needed to brush up on what I learned about Biology in high school and learn about signal processing.
In 2012, while I was writing my Master’s degree dissertation in Bioinformatics, I was hired by Expedia Group as Associate Software Engineer. That was a great opportunity I didn’t want to lose, so I decided to move from Naples to Rome. I have to admit it was a tough year, a new city, a new job, a new life, and while I was still working on my thesis, but I eventually managed to complete my research work and my thesis, which was titled “Signal Processing applied to human genome to identify natural selection markers”.
Expedia Group was and it is a great place! I met great people and learned a lot, that’s why I’m still working there. Expedia is also that kind of Company which allows you to try different roles and find the one that fits you best: after the 5 years as Software Engineer, during which I grew from Associate to Software Development Engineer II, I’ve spent other 5 years as people manager (first as Technology Lead and then as an Engineering Manager). Even though my experience as people manager was exciting, and it taught me a lot, I felt I was missing too much being involved in deep technical conversations, hence I decided to apply for an internal role as Senior Software Engineer, which is the role I’m currently covering.
If you want to know more, feel free to visit my LinkedIn profile.