Meet the Software Engineering team
September 20, 2021   ·  2min

Hello! I'm David Sorrentino, and I'm the Head of Software Engineering at ProntoPro. I started using my Dad's personal computer when I was 6 years old. It shipped an Intel 80286, with MD-DOS as an operating system. I immediately fell in love with the idea that a machine could be programmed by a human, using a language. For me, it was like talking to a robot and that felt like magic. It still feels like that today, and I hope to keep the same feeling for my entire life.

After graduating in Computer Science, I started working for software houses and web agencies. Five years ago, I stumbled upon ProntoPro and it was love at first sight. The idea of building a horizontal marketplace where buying services feels like buying products has excited me from the very beginning. It sounds like such a challenge, doesn't it? So, I joined the company as a Software Engineer and started this wonderful chapter of my career.

Today I lead ProntoPro's talented Software Engineering team and the goal is still the same: shaping the future of local services!

👋 Meet the Team!

The Software Engineering team is structured in three functions: Backend, Frontend, and QA. They work in cross-functional teams - that we call Squads - together with Product Managers, Product Designers, Product Researchers, Data Analysts, Data Engineers, Site Reliability Engineers. Our workflow is inspired by Basecamp's Shape Up methodology and our Squads are assembled ad-hoc at each iteration according to the projects they'll work on.

The Backend and Frontend Engineers' career path is organized into 5 levels and 2 tracks. You can read more about it on our Engineering blog. The QA Engineers' career path is organized into 4 levels, instead: Junior, Middle, Senior, and Lead. We're about to publish a growth framework for QA any time soon.

We foster autonomous decision making, do trunk-based development, a lot of pair programming, event storming, example mapping, shift-left testing, and follow a strict code review process before merging our code.

🚀 The biggest challenge we're facing

Well, we currently have plenty of challenges I could tell you about. We're dismantling a monolith in PHP into Go and PHP microservices. We want to open-source some of our frontend internal libraries, which are an integral part of our monorepo. We want to implement E2E automatic tests for our web and mobile applications. We want to go from Continuous Delivery to Continuous Deployment.

I really can't decide which one is the biggest, but I'd like to tell you more about them if you ask me.

🔭 The technologies we use

Our technology stack includes Go, PHP, Symfony, MySQL, Elasticsearch, Redis, RabbitMQ, GraphQL, TypeScript, Next.js, Node.js, React, React Native, Docker, Kubernetes, Helm Charts, AWS. We use Drone CI for our CI and CD pipelines.

We're very fond of clean code, DDD, automated testing, event sourcing, CQRS, functional programming, and BDD.

👨‍💻 Why a talented Engineer should work at ProntoPro

We're a young, skilled, and international team based in Italy. We have beautiful offices in Milan and Rome, but you would be free to work remotely if you prefer to. We've got a very challenging roadmap, a compelling product, and a modern technology stack. You'd have the chance to positively impact the lives of millions of users from our very first days in the company. And... we're hiring! Do you really need other reasons for joining us? 🙃 Just get in touch with me on LinkedIn. I'd love to hear from you!