Roberto Russo

The first program I typed was a BASIC graphics demo; I was 11 and I hacked it from my Commodore 128 user manual. Just after that, Tron (1982) and WarGames (1983) made the rest. Since then, I’ve built software for the joy of it.

At first I focused on videogame programming, especially Newtonian physics and realistic simulation. Then the object-oriented paradigm, conceptual data modeling (ontology engineering), the praxis of large software craftsmanship, UML outlines, design patterns, design of relational databases, normal forms, data mining, machine learning, software configuration management, performance profiling, agentic AI development.

Besides that, I’m passionately interested in information security (pentesting, red-team / blue-team, computer forensics, cryptography, steganography, man-in-the-middle attacks, eavesdropping, vulnerability assessment) and the human factors of software development: “Engineering is easy, people are hard.” For this reason I’m an avid reader of Steve McConnell, Tom De Marco, Ed Yourdon, Joel Spolsky and Jeff Atwood.

I like to be challenged and involved in projects that require working outside my comfort zone and knowledge set, because I like to keep learning. In my spare time my main interests are race rc-cars (building, tuning and racing), photography and music production with electric guitars, drums and synths, with my son (all computer-aided too).

Stack

Specialties: object-oriented design, API design, software construction, DevOps. Languages: C++, C#, Java, Python, Go, Rust, SQL, bash. RDBMS: Oracle, PostgreSQL, Microsoft SQL Server, SQLite. NoSQL: Redis, DynamoDB, MongoDB, RocksDB. Streaming & telemetry: Kafka, Kinesis, Apache Flink, MQTT, InfluxDB. Cloud & infra: AWS, Kubernetes, Docker, Terraform, Ansible. Big data & distributed: Hadoop, Parquet, Dask. OS: Whonix, Qubes OS. AI development: agentic development with Claude, offline LLMs.