NICOLA NARDINO

Welcome to My Site

This is my personal web site. I'll try to keep it updated with the evolution of my professional and private life, with news about my current job, software engineering resources and other funny stuffs related with my life (motorcycles, sports,music and much more...).

I grew up in South Italy, in the heart of the ancient Magna Graecia, first in the small and sunny city of Pizzo (close to Sicily), later in Cosenza where I took my Master's degree in Computer Science Engineering and I started working as software engineer. I spent six years working in Cosenza, then I decided to move away. Proud to be italian, the native country of people like Archimedes (Magna Graecia), Leornardo da Vinci, Galileo Galilei, Enrico Fermi, Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino, I moved to Zürich, the 'rail city', or if you prefer the city of the banks. Here I work in banking sector and enjoy the international and cosmopolitan atmosphere of the city. Zürich is smooth, clean and fair. People are polite, usage of private cars is discouraged/green way of life deeply encouraged.    

 As to my job, I've been working as software engineer for the last eight years. Beside of being my job, Information Tecnology science is my main passion, discovered in the 80's when my parents gave me, as a present for my 12s, a wonderful Commodore 64 and my dreams came true. C64 basic language introduced me in the programming world! Now I use to program many languages and frameworks, from JEE to .NET, from C++ to PL/SQL, T-SQL, MDX etc..., deploying on Linux/Unix/Windows servers. I've got strong datawarehousing and B.I. skills, both on ROLAP and MOLAP databases. I reackon that the language itseöf or the specific framework are not the essence of my job rather the problem you're trying to solve, so than once you've learned one of them you should be able to work with all the others. I think, good software architects should be good programmers too! Only having long term programming experience can give you broad vision of the software infrastructure. I'm interested in learning and applying new tecnologies having the opportinity to speed up the day-by-day workflow. Last but not least, I'm interested in Java opensource frameworks for the enterprise applications, like Hibernate, Struts and (very lately), Spring and deeply studying JEE 1.5 new specifications. As soon as I'll find spare time, I'll publish tutorials on JEE 1.5 specifications and much more. I heavily support Agile Methodologies of software engineering like XP(eXtreme Programming, SCRUM, TDD(Test Driven Development) and I strongly agree with the vision "code-build-test-deploy" as fundamental of agile methodologies. I've been focusing on systems integration by Web Services and MOM(Message Oriented Middleware).

Furthermore, I'm deeply interested in realtime systems applied to financial workflows, like in the Equities Derivatives and FX Order Management Systems. In this regard, I'm focusing on RTSJ which are realtime specifications implemented in the Realtime JVMs. In fact, it's been a couple of years that Java has been plunging into the realtime world, previously strictly held in the hands of C/C++ programmers.

Here are, in brief, my skills :

• Operating Systems : UNIX, LINUX, Microsoft Windows.
• Programming Languages : Java, C/C++(ANSI Standard), C#, Visual Basic, Turbo Pascal, Modula 2, basic knowledge : Pro* C, Assembly, Prolog, Lisp.
• Enterprise Application Servers : Jboss 3-4-5, Oracle Application Server (9.x e 10.x), Sun Java System Application Server Platform Edition 9
• Web Servers : Tomcat 3-4-5, Apache HTTP Server, Microsoft IIS, Cassini Web Server.
• Web Tecnologies : JSP, ASP, XSP, Web Services, ASP.NET, STRUTS,XML(DOM,SAX,JDOM,DOM4J)/XSL, basic knowledge of SPRING.
• Distributed Infrastructures : MOM, JEE(EJB 3.0, 2.1), COM+, CORBA.
• ORM : Hibernate, Entity Bean Model (EJB 2.1)/POJO Persistence Model(EJB 3.0).
• Data Manipulation Languages : PL/SQL, T-SQL, MDX.
• DBMS : Oracle 9i/10g, MS SQL Server 2000/2005, MS Analysis Services, MySQL 4.X, MS Access.
• Datawarehousing/OLAP/Reporting Tools : Suite Business Objects, Microstrategy, Oracle Discoverer, Microsoft Office.
• Data Modelling : : Microsoft Visio, CA Erwin, StarUML.
• IDE/RAD : JDeveloper, Sun ONE Studio/NetBeans IDE, Eclipse, Visual Studio .NET 2003/2005, Bloodshed Dev-C++.
• DBMS tools : TOAD, PL/QSL Developer, Aqua Data Studio.
• Software Engineering Methodologies : MDA/UML, Design Patterns(GoF, J2EE), eXtreme Programming, TDD.
• Programming Models : OOP, AOP, Procedural Programming.
• Text Mining : Jakarta Lucene, Oracle Text.
• Test and Deploy : JUnit, Ant.
• Workshops on datawarehousing and B.I. (nardino.pdf).
• Language skills : Italian first language, English fluent both read and written, German basic to intermediate.
• much more.

As to my hobbies and interests, I love riding my bike (Suzuki GSX-R 1000), playing sports (tennis, soccer, and more), listening to music (from extreme Metal to Classical music). My favourite band is Metallica, other bands in my playlist : Nirvana, Sepultura, Placebo, Green Day, Gun's Roses, Dimmu Burgir, Mercyful Fate, Slayer, Iron Maiden, Morbid Angel, Manowar and much much more.   I like reading ICT books, essaies  (my favourite writer is Bertrand Russell), fantasy books,  politics magazines. I'm interested in economic and financial themes and geo-politcs too.

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What's Up Lately

JAX-WS : more than approved! Simply wonderful specifications! They speed up and make clear the entire life cycle of building Java Web Services! Java annotations rule! (look forward to programming page for detailed examples)

EJB3 new specification : approved (by me -:)). As to stateless and stateful session beans, it speeds up the entire development and deploying process but it could lead developers disregarding security policies and other stuffs related to the absence of deployment descriptors! As to Entity Bean fading away? Yeah, JPA was great pieace of innovation, entity beans were recognized by Sun Microsystems, and not only, as too complex and poor of ORM capabilities but are we sure it is right coding ORM features inside Java plain classes? Ok, ORM on POJO  was great simplification against entity beans' deployment descriptors from the developer point of view, and what about the deployer and system administrator side? I think, JPA is only first step toward good ORM specification, like Hibernate(not based on standard de jure specification but an opensource ORM implementation) is.

Could Spring framework become the new JEE? Yes, it could be seen as lightweight extra-container "application server"! I know, it's a contradiction in terms but If you want to integrate tomcat with hibernate, giving transaction capabilities Spring is the optimal choice! The down side is that Interface21 is trying to enlarge more and more its "award winning" piece of software (Spring Web/Workflow/...). I mean, Spring is risking to enlarge as much as JEE is but, on the other side, its tiles oriented architecture could save it (if you want only transaction feature you add it to your project and so on...if you want transaction + workflow etc...). Anyway, keep in mind, Spring is not a specification but a software implemented by a company.

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