Fabio Radwan

Chill Insurance is one of the largest broker insurance companies in Ireland. I joined this company to work and improve existing development projects and infrastructures, as well as creating and innovating the work experience for both internal team and customers. I quickly got involved and took part in some of the core business aspects (e.g. the quote engine), managing the process of application deployments, as well as implementing new features using Azure services (traffic managers and Stream Analytics), in order to guarantee business continuity and more data to monitor our internal system applications and customer facing portals.

In this year I decided to take up the self-employed path in order to be able to explore new technologies and not be tied to certain technologies/languages and keep myself up to speed with the Web Development evolution. During this period I had chance to put my hands on different type of works and technologies, from regular Wordpress sites to more complex web applications using Python, Django and Restful APIs as well as some React Native for mobile development.

Main achievements and duties:

• Revamped Premier Spas Ireland website and significantly increased their conversion and sales

• Learnt new technologies such as Python & Django and used them to develop web applications, together with Restful APIs used to serve a mobile app built in React Native

• Built website for Dolce Sicily, a renowned cafe & restaurant in Dublin

• In the process of building an online newspaper for an Italian company

KCO is a company established in 1999 which designs and develops websites for online shops, online advertising & marketing systems, financial companies; we also develop mobile apps as well as making sure that our website and web applications run perfectly on any platform/device. In 2014 the company was acquired by Arekibo Communications, one of the largest web agencies in Ireland and recently winner of the Eir award as "best large agency of the year".

One of the first projects I had to take care of in KCO was developing a 2.0 version of the Bulmers/Magners Brand Library. The system was quite old, it was built using ASP.NET 2.0 and the client needed a way to totally manage the library and having the possibility to upload large files (up to 1GB), create/edit/delete categories within the library and also the option to add international brands that were recently acquired by the company, for instance Tennent's and Gaymers Cider.
My solution was to upgrade the application using the latest .NET framework (4/4.5) and a touch of JQuery and Ajax to make the application richer than ever. I personally managed the whole project life-cycle, developed the application and kept the communication with the client in order to make them aware of the progresses made.

Main achievements and duties:

• Implemented Source Control system in-house (SVN) for a better project organization.

• Managing the ticketing system used for assisting customers with bugs/incidents reported

• Project analysis

• Technical Document writing, product proposals

• Development of web applications as well as maintaining existing projects

• Database design/development

• Deployment and configuration of web sites/web applications to the live servers both Windows and Linux (debian)

• SEO Optimization

• Testing and Quality assurance

MondoPallone.it is an online sport magazine founded by me and other two friends that decided to create an online newspaper (initially only about football) that was meant to be different than all the other competitors. The website grown very quickly and expanded the topics to other sports such as Rugby, Basket, Formula 1, Tennis and many others. Currently our database contains over 22.000 articles. After only a year, thanks to an intensive work of SEO Optimization, we managed to be included into Google News service and for this reason the number of unique visitors and page views increased rapidly (20.000 views a day with peaks of 600 concurrent users) so we needed to power up our website. We had to switch from a shared hosting to a dedicated linux server which I configured and optimized by myself.

My tasks are not only technical since I have to coordinate, together with the senior staff, all the editors that write for the website; at the moment we have 59 people working on the site, and every day we have to coordinate news and important events to look after as well as resolving any technical issue that the guys may encounter.

The system runs on WordPress as I think it is probably the best open-source platform for building this type of websites. It is great especially for editors as the user interface is very user-friendly and after they have received a short training (usually it lasts one or two weeks) on how to use the system they are completely independent and they are able to post articles on the website by themselves.

Since I usually work with Microsoft technologies (Asp.Net, Windows server) I had to expand my skills and learn by myself PHP, Apache and Linux. The most challenging part for me it was building our own Linux web server, trying to make it as much secure as possible as well as optimizing it for best performances.

Main achievements:

• Expanded a small team made by 4-5 people to currently 59 people

• SEO Optimization which brought us to be included in Google News and put us on the first result pages for many keywords and increased significantly the number of visitor/page views

• Development and customization of specific modules needed for the back/front-end of the site

• Installation, configuration and optimization of our own Linux WebServer based on Debian distro

HP is a well known multinational IT company that provides hardware, software as well as providing consulting and outsourcing business. I had the chance to work in the Enterprise Services department, particularly in the Microsoft business which used to be the most profitable department of HP Ireland.
I was part of the BPOS-S/Office365 Microsoft Team mainly as Tier 2 technical support for Enterprise Premier customers, but over time my duties have expanded and I quickly became a point of contact for my team manager and my team mates.

Here are some of the keys tasks I had for my role:

• Assisting IT administrators with technical issues related to the BPOS/Office 365 as well as client issues, networking, Active Directory and Exchange servers.

• Leading the Italian Transition team in order to ensure a smooth transition from BPOS to Office 365 to all our clients, and give them the best customer satisfaction.

• Running reports for the teams in order to evaluate productivity and performance for each agent.

• Monthly review engineers on individual bases in order to identify any gap in their technical knowledge and gather their feedback.

• Ensuring Service Level Agreements (SLA) demands are met.

• Performing technical interviews.

• Performing case reviews and report the results to TMs.

• Coaching the new hires, either technically and quality wise.

• Being a point of consultation for procedures for all teams across the site regarding BlackBerry Cloud Services.

• Participating to conference calls with Microsoft in order to escalate some technical/procedural issues.

• Performing call-backs to customers in order to ensure their satisfaction with our services.