Kit#18 Tobia Loschiavo

First name: Tobia
Last name: Loschiavo
Country: Italy (based in UK)
Occupation: Software Engineer

Where to find Tobia online:

Tobia, what do you do?

I am a Software Engineer and I work as a contractor, mainly in the finance and banking industry, developing software in Java, Scala, Kotlin and JavaScript.

What is your background?

After my Master degree in Software Engineering, I started working as a contractor Software Developer for many different companies. In 2012, after one year working abroad I came back to Italy and I founded my own startup, WeOrder, with the aim to create a better experience for customers at restaurants, bars, clubs and similar venues. In 2016 WeOrder was acquired by a Norwegian company. After the end of my startup adventure I’ve been employed by an italian startup, Satispay, for almost one year, then I decided to move to London where I got back to work as a contractor in the banking industry. I currently work as a contractor Scala developer for a major bank company.

Your favorite tools to help you with your work?

Intellij Idea is the best IDE you can use to code with Scala, Kotlin or Java. It is fast and provides lot of facilities to address common issues with software development.

At my current workplace we apply agile methodologies to every task and Jira is the perfect tool to keep our Scrum board updated.

I use Bitbucket to manage all my git repositories. It is well integrated with Jira and other Atlassian products. It makes my life os much easier.

While working as a contractor I’ve always used Slack to keep in touch with my teammates. It’s the perfect tool to communicate, share and collaborate.

Jenkins is a continuous integration server that allows me to check that every commit I push doesn’t break the whole system. It automatically executes tests and manages the deployment of all the updates to the different environments I’m working on.

Artifactory is an enterprise universal artifact manager (yes it sounds very nerdy I know) that I use, at my current company, to manage several aspects of my software development processes.

Kubernetes is another tool that I use on a daily basis to automate the deployment and management of all my applications in a containerized environment.

Google Drive is where I store every possible document related to my activity (invoices, receipts, contracts and so on).

Since I’m not a native english speaker, with Grammarly I can always be sure that the emails I write are correct. Grammarly fixes common spelling mistakes and it also suggests me new synonyms to use, which I find very helpful sometimes.

I always use Mailtrack to check if and when all the important/urgent emails I send out has been read by their recipients.

Your favorite tools on a personal level?

I use Pocket to save and then read interesting articles offline, while I’m on a plane (during my weekly commute) between Italy and the UK.

Your absolute favorite tool in one sentence?

It helps me so much with software development that I cannot imagine working without it.