Guglielmo D'Anna

Experience

1. 
   June 2024 – current

   Codestory AI

   Design Engineer

   London, UK

   I spent most of my time hacking on the VS Code codebase, as Aide (Codestory's first product) is a fork of the popular code editor. I delved deep into a wonderfully designed, yet undocumented and complex codebase to create novel features and UX. Extensibility and performance are at the heart of the entire codebase, and UI is built imperatively.

   I grew rapidly as an engineer, inspired by some of the most talented colleagues I ever had. I raised my bar on productivity and prioritisation working in a very competitive space like the AI industry, where it's vital to ship something every week.

2. 
   October 2021 – April 2024

   Absolute S.r.l.

   Design Engineer

   Florence, Italy

   I researched and developed solutions to improve UX and DX on the wide array of products Absolute has developed over the years. I also designed their new products from the ground up.

   • Onboarded the whole company towards the switch to hooks over class-based React.
   • Set a new styling standard, using TailwindCSS for styling and headless UI libraries to abstract complex UI behavior.
   • Created a framework with the goal to improve DX and productivity for their ambitious web apps. This includes, among many other things, a Remix-like data loading and routing system, an abstraction over CRUD operations, a set of mindful components that encourage composition over prop proliferation, tooling and a CD/CI pipeline built on AWS that ensure basic best practices.
   • Designed the first 3 apps built on the framework.
   • Wrote server code and gained experience with AWS (Lambda, Cognito, Dynamo, S3), as well as Cloudflare workers.
3. 
   April 2020 – September 2022

   aPosto.jp

   Freelance Web Developer

   Remote

   I jumped at the occasion to work with them whenever I could. Their design work elevated my taste and allowed me to reach for those technologies that you would otherwise use little in your everyday job.

   • Implemented complex animations, including 3D models, using gsap, three.js and WebGL. Take a look at the Eaglys website for some examples.
   • Was their developer of choice, incluing their passion projects, like their coding school for kids.
4. 
   September 2018 – October 2021

   NexusBay B.V.

   Co-Founder, Design Engineer & Product Owner

   Amsterdam, Netherlands (hybrid)

   I co-founded this company with Niels Baay. Think of it as a LinkedIn for students, but with a non-discriminatory job matching algorithm at its heart. I learned lots of things about development, design, and product management along the way.

   • Designed and implemented the frontend of a large web app used by thousands of students (ROC van Amsterdam and Radboud University students), from wireframe design and iteration to product development and maintenance.
   • Ensured consistency through a resilient design system that supports multiple themes. Held meetings at the crossroads of software engineering, design and business strategy.
   • Handled relations and communication with our first client, Radboud University.