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Professional Experience

Ruby on Rails platform to manage the cultural and sports group of a major Portuguese bank (BPI);

Invoicing application "VOS", which includes modules for accounting, stocks, salaries, medical clinics management, and more;

Development of a dropzone management software application, to handle schedules and passenger manifest at any parachuting operations site;

Development of other custom-made software applications and websites.

Maintaining the old map shop release system and PND content server (i.e. home server) and working on developing the next generation of the same products.

Short stop through the Mobile department. Though only a month, this project provided some insight on location based services, namely routing and geocoding of addresses, and development on mobile platforms (Midlets). Went back to the old department due to some company internal project restructuring.

One of the original developers of TomTom MapShare technology's back end server. This system is responsible for the storage, processing, and distribution of map and POI (points of interest) corrections to it's more than 20 million users. This was TomTom's most important project in 2007.

Adopting the Scrum agile methodology from the start, was responsible for the design and implementation of the entire solution (backend server and a web interface where TomTom content moderators can manage incoming corrections), along with 2 other team members.

As with all server-side projects, the solution had to tackle the usual performance and scalability challenges, as well as the immense amounts of handled data. The answers to these issues were translated into the following:

• Database tweaking - Some particular parameters had to be tweaked in order to make the most out of our database cluster.
• Read/Write connection splitting - To take advantage of a cluster (master/slave replication) this had to be implemented. In this case, at the application level (custom data source RW splitting module).
• Connection data streaming - Some tweaking had to be performed in order for the database to stream the results to the application, instead of building it up in memory on the database driver. We went one step further and implemented streaming from the DB directly to the HTTP clients (minimal memory footprint on the server).
• Data distribution caching - All the optimizations on a database cluster will eventually prove less fruitful than a proper caching strategy so we also implemented this, though using an out-of-the-box solution.

Was also responsible for the creation of other smaller tools (testing, load/stress runs, etc.), some Python scripts for performance measurement and charting of results, and a maven plugin for the generation of a SQL schema from Hibernate annotations.

Sole responsible for the design and implementation of a data aggregation and reporting tool for the MapShare backend server's data. This project was born from the management's need to monitor and get information about the current status of the project, namely the number of users sharing corrections, what kind of devices are sharing data, how much data is being shared, what type of corrections are more common, etc.

This tool consisted on scheduled data aggregators, that retrieved information from the live MapShare system and stored it in a processed/aggregated form, and a web interface - where management could see the aggregated data and generate Excel reports from it.

In the same team that developed MapShare, was responsible for the design and implementation of a new (web) version of the TomTom safety cameras moderation tool. This tool allows TomTom content moderators to manage safety (speed) camera information, basically deciding what will end up in user's devices.

This project relied intensively on Ajax, around an openlayers map interface, when moderators could view, change, import, and export information on safety cameras that was previously gathered from several sources.

One of the developers responsible for the redesign of the home banking website of one of the company’s clients (Santander/Totta Bank). This included new features, according to new services offered by the bank to its customers, a new web layout, and the integration with an existing CMS.

Also responsible for the development of a new web application, targeting customer investments - for both home users and companies. The development of this application included integration with one of Infosistema’s core products, a connector to retrieve stock quotes from Reuters.

One of the three core developers of the Republic of Angola’s voting census software applications, put into production in November of 2006. More than 7.5 million of Angola’s inhabitants registered themselves using the new electronic census framework.

Other software applications developed included one to allow an Angolan province’s govern (Huila) to keep a register of the region’s farms and crops, as well as some other in-house software products.

Design and implementation of a website for the Social Centre of Palmela (http://www.cspalmela.org), a non-profit social care institution, comprised of several child-oriented services, for children older than 3 months, like hobby workshops, psychological support, etc. The PHP content management system Joomla (previously known as Mambo) was used for the implementation of the website (http://www.joomla.org).

Design and implementation of a website for the Anime – Projecto de Animação e Formação organization (http://www.animepaf.org) using the Post-Nuke content management system (http://www.postnuke.com).