Michele Simionato, Ph. D.

I work as an independent software consultant and trainer. My major expertise is in Python and actually I am a well recognized Python expert (google for "Michele Simionato Python").

Personal data

Name: Michele Simionato
Title: Ph. D.
Job Title: Software consultant
Address: Via Nervi 2 interno 6 00055 Ladispoli (ROMA) ITALY
E-mail: michele.simionato@gmail.com
Home-page: http://www.phyast.pitt.edu/~micheles/
Cell phone: 0039 338 635 4496
Home phone: 0039 06 99 22 91 71
Date of Birth: 11/04/1969
Citizenship: Italian
Languages: Italian, English, French

Professional Experience

02/2005 - today: software consultant and trainer for Partecs, Dagomedia, Truelite
03/2004 - 01/2005: senior software developer at Partecs s.r.l. (Rome)
09/2003 - 02/2004: free-lance collaborator of IBMdeveloperWorks, O' Reilly, Pyzine, etc.
10/2001 - 08/2003: Research associated at the University of Pittsburgh (USA)
03/1998 - 09/2001: Post-doc fellow at the LPTHE of Jussieu (PARIS)
03-1995 - 02/1998: Ph.D candidate in Theoretical Physics at the University of Parma

Recent activities

In the last year, my activities as a developer were the following:

I developed an Internet voting application for Partecs s.r.l;

I developed an Intranet accessible document archive for Dagomedia s.r.l, to be used by an Italian bank;

I developed a PDF converter for the same bank, using the ReportLab toolkit.

I also have a significant experience as a trainer:

I gave remote training to Partecs developers in India;

I gave a fairly complete Python course (64 hours) for the council of Bozen;

I gave a course on advanced Python (8 hours) at the international ACCU conference in Oxford.

Finally, I have given some contribution to the Open Source community:

written various articles published by IBM DeveloperWorks, O'Reilly, et al.

written many Python recipes and released a "decorator" module;

given a small contribution to the Chicken Scheme implementation.

I have worked with Zope, Quixote, Apache, MySQL, ReportLab and many other open-source techologies.

I have come back to programming after a long detour in Theorical Physics (see http://www.phyast.pitt.edu/~micheles/curriculum.html for my scientific curriculum). I have been living in France (Paris) and in the U.S. (Pittsburgh) as a postdoc researcher.

Interests in software development

agile metodologies and test driven developement;
rapid development techniques, prototyping and design of applications;
programming paradigms (object oriented programming, functional programming, metaprogramming, etc.);
mini-languages and programming languages in general;
text processing and text generation.

Involvement with the Open Source community

I am quite active in the international Python community. I have contributed with posts to the newsgroup, recipes, articles and documentation. I have written papers on esoteric subjects such as metaclasses and multiple inheritance, as well a practical papers on scripting, testing and graph generation. Recently, I have released a "decorator" module (http://www.phyast.pitt.edu/~micheles/python/decorator.zip). Plus, I am often invited at international conferences.

June 2006: I will give a Python course at the EuroPython conference in Goteborg.
April 2005: Invited speaker at the Oxford ACCU conference where I gave a 8 hours course on advanced Python programming and a talk on testing methodologies;
October 2004: Invited speaker at the International CodeJam conference of Ferrara, where I gave a talk on doctest.
October 2004: Written a paper about Graphviz published by O'Reilly
September 2004: Written a paper about optparse published by pyzine
January 2003: Written an essay on Python Method Resolution Order hosted in the Python official website.
December 2002: Written a paper on metaclass programming in collaboration with David Mertz and published by IBM developerWorks

See http://michelesimionato.objectis.net/MyWiki/MyWritings for more.