Alberto Pontini
Hello.
My name is Alberto, I'm a years old Software Engineer based in Italy, currently working as a Senior Backend Engineer at Spotify. My team is primarily responsible for managing the source of truth of the entire Spotify's music catalog metadata and how we model music internally.
Some of my most notable successes in this space have been:
  • Expanding the number of recognized credit roles from 12 to over 5000, designing the workflows for their management and translation, and building the APIs to distribute them to millions of users. This work laid the foundation for features like SongDNA
  • Increasing publishing speed for rewarded music providers by up to 32x
  • Building licensing services that enabled Spotify to launch music videos in the US and Canada

Experience

Previously, I worked as a Java backend developer for Zextras were I developed a cloud storage solution and a WebRTC videochat, both serving users in many organizations using Zimbra. Later on, I moved to the WebRTC videochat portion for the (then) new product, Carbonio.
I've also worked at H-Benchmark were I helped developing a data intelligence web application whose goal is to help hospitality get better by analyzing data and giving insights on how a single structure and its territory are performing.

Education

On the 25th of February, 2019 I graduated after attending a Master's Degree course in Computer Science Engineering at the University of Padua.
My thesis aimed at creating an Android application (both the application and all the backend structure) to aid users' prospectic memory, a particular type of memory which allows people to remember things that needs to happen in the future like buying milk before getting back home.
This application uses Natural Language Processing to retrieve the user's requests, allowing him/her to define a task using only natural language. The backend then automatically figures where and when to complete the task.

Open Source

In the past, I've published some Ruby gems. One in particular, mina-proteus, was accepted on awesome hanami, a list of the most useful gems for the Ruby Hanami framework.
I also used to contribute to yap, a forked tool that allows you to build packages for many GNU/Linux distributions with a single package definition.
Moreover, I also took part in the ProtonDB crowdsourced translation.

Reading

I also like reading. My most recent readings have been, in no particular order: