Working With Rails

Diego Scataglini started his computer carrier in 1996 as a multimedia developer and graphic artist.

After spending a couple of year consulting in South Florida was finally hired as web designer by New River technologies in Fort Lauderdale. It was here that Diego discovered a passion for web development and an inclination for programming.

During his 2 years at New River Technologies Diego became an expert in cross-browser DHTML and an abdicate for web standards and code separation. He was the lead designer for DeltaVacations.com and contributed to a Continental Vacation redesign.

As a result of constantly pushing the boundaries of what could be done on a web site, Diego was promoted multiple times up to the role of Creative Director and Web Manager. He then lead a team of 3 back-end programmers and 6 web designers in successful migrations to new systems and technologies always within a 3 week turn-around. During this time he was also involved in the e-commerce aspect of the business.

Diego then left New River Technologies for a more challenging position as Senior Web Developer at Petplace.com, at the time a content provider for AOL, Netscape and Compuserve. The temptation to work on this kind of large scale sites was too great to resist. Here he discovered his next passion: web application development. During the next 2 years Diego developed or helped developing a multitude of web applications including: content management systems, internal web tools, distributed web applications, community based web applications. Here he got involved into MsSql database design and optimization as well. Here he also developed a javascript library that used IE capabilities to make async calls to the web server with an iframe fall back, a precursor to current Ajax libraries.

After a short break Diego Scataglini went back to consulting. In the next 3 years He had a series of discoveries including lightweight dynamic languages, AJAX and low-cost open source solutions. In this period he had the opportunity to gain experience with Oracle solutions, Mysql performance optimization, Unix and Linux systems.

During 4 years at theglobe.com he developed both internal and external web-based solutions. Here Diego helped lowering the company technical overhead by promoting open source software and developing using open standards and agile methodologies.

At theglobe.com he developed large scale websites using cutting-edge technologies interconnecting VOIP, web-browsers, desktop and mobile application, Ruby on Rails websites and asterisk.

Diego Scataglini is currently consulting for Norwegian Cruise Line as Senior Software Engineer. Sneaking in open source software in the enterprise world whenever he get a chance.

In September of 2006 Diego contributed 12 recipes to Rails Cookbook by Rob Orsini, the book hit the bookstores in January of 2007 and I got a very nice acknowledgment.

A year later Diego had the pleasure to act as technical reviewer for Obie Fernandez’s “Rails Way”.

Diego consulted for Norwegian Cruise Line from late 2007 till January of 2009. He got this time his taste of life in the Enterprise Java world. Here he helped standardize the ncl.com site on 1 javascript library. He implemented solutions based on Ext, Flex, Ec2 and Rails and helped optimize the front end performance of the site.

In his rare spare time Diego enjoys spending time with his family, playing guitar and writing articles on open source projects or contributing to them. He also enjoy discussing in great detail on the art and science of making music and software development with anybody that would reciprocate the favor.