Recently, I joined Portchain, a software firm in the shipping company, as a software engineer.

My origins at a huge software firm

Now that I have been part of Portchain’s team for over a month, I remember my last day at work with my former employer, one of the biggest software firms in Italy. I worked there for more than a decade. Over the course of so many years, there were good, bad and very bad moments. I had joined the company to develop a huge developer–oriented source generator/ framework. 

In all those years I learned a lot, mostly on my own, for my own sake, driven by a big hunger for knowledge. I developed high profile skills in security and system integration. I also had the chance to develop huge and all-encompassing products for the top financial players in my country. This is the kind of opportunity that only a big software firm can put on the table.

Building products for large financial institutions was not always easy. I worked really hard to build bridges between old legacy systems and brand new solutions. Just a few years ago, I had the opportunity to work on a very important project and my team did an awesome job. It was how working in a big company should be. We developed a foundational technology in order to easily integrate a particular kind of legacy systems at a more abstract level. What we built has been used for years now in different products of the client, and even extended multiple times with very little effort. It is a damn good design piece of software, if I should say so myself. It is my bit that I left with them.

Pursuing better at Portchain

So why did I leave? Since the amazing product did not make history, it did not become the standard. Pressure to deliver more in a short time span kept increasing, and the quality of the products started to suffer. I’m sorry to say so. Probably, in a company with thousands of employees it is a necessary evil, but still, it made my day-to-day work a grind, and lowered my motivation.

My client’s sector, banking, had been one of the first industries to become heavily digitalized. Now we had a huge volume of legacy systems that could not sustain the volume and the business needs of the modern financial industry. It is not a problem that can be tackled overnight, but I needed a change. I needed to work on something new, that was not just a big rewrite of a legacy product.

Portchain’s international and talented team

I joined a vibrant young company in pursuit of my dream of becoming a better software engineer, not just an experienced developer. Portchain is a software firm that works for realizing the value in Berth Planning Optimization with Artificial Intelligence software. I’m working with friends that are skilled professionals who exchange knowledge and jokes. The team is driven by a mission I believe in: To build a software that simplifies people’s jobs with the help of advanced optimization and machine learning techniques. I will work in an international environment which is something I always dreamed of.

Life is full of uncertainty, but from the uncertainty comes possibility, and from possibility comes development. At the end of the day, I’m a developer! Technology thrills me, but not just “technology for the sake of it“.  My quest today, as an engineer with two decades of experience, is to find the right kind of innovation that matters and solves a very specific business need. Portchain‘s AI software appears as the perfect opportunity. And keeps on sailing.