Luca Romagnoli

I am Luca Romagnoli. I am originally from Italy and I followed what most people would call an unconventional path to becoming a Software Engineer.

I started to grow a passion for technology around the age of 16, when I realised that I could use a computer to express my musical creativity, which I wasn’t able to with standard instruments. While learning electronic music production, I came across a DSP visual programming language, which led me to get a basic understanding of standard programming languages, such as C.

In the early two-thousands I was also heavily involved in the Drum and Bass (dnb) music scene in Italy. I and a team of other 4 guys, created the - now defunct - dnbmovement.it, a portal with the latest events for dnb and a web forum for music fans to discuss. During that time, I had the opportunity to use web frameworks such as Joomla, WordPress, phpBB, learn about HTML, CSS and the LAMP stack, that was very popular at the time.

In late 2012, in the aftermath of the 2009 crisis I decided to move to London to pursue a career in IT, given the limited opportunities in my home country. I enrolled in a part-time BSc in Computer Science with Open University while working full time for a Mexican take-away restaurant. In 2015 I finally landed my first IT job as Operations Engineer for a growing start up called Empello, where I had the opportunity to gain hands-on experience with Python. In the space of one year, I built a web scraper which the company used to automate a manual task and I got promoted to Junior Developer.

That has been the beginning of a journey that led me to work with some amazing companies and learn all I know to this day about software engineering.

I aim to write clean and well tested code and I always stand by DRY and single responsibilities principles. My language of choice is Python, I love how it lets you express complex abstractions in a simple and elegant way. I also have a fair amount of experience in JavaScript/TypeScript. Recently I started dabbling with React single page applications and it's lots of fun.

During my spare time I like to produce electronic music and sporadically attend musical events. I am also a big fan of cinematic classical music artists such as Ravel, Satie and Debussy. Recently I have also turned into a bit of a gym freak. I train five days a week.