Marco De Bortoli · London
Nearly thirty years building things, from embedded control systems to platforms at scale. These days I care less about which stack and more about whether it's worth building at all.
I'm Marco. Debo since childhood, Mark if that's easier. Born in Milan, with roots in Treviso and Cremona. Settled in a good few countries since, across three continents: some for work, some for love, a couple that are a story for another time. The UK is the one that stopped being temporary.
I'm Technology Director at Build Circle. A decade or so ago the interesting questions stopped being technical. Most of my work now is about what a team is building, why, and whether the way they're organised will actually let them.
I trained as an electrical engineer and started with my hands in it: control boards and instrumentation for the likes of ABB, Fincantieri and the Kuwait Oil Company, from small panels up to power stations, refineries and oil and gas pipelines. The code came with the hardware too, naval training simulators and real-time data acquisition, with no forgiveness for sloppy timing.
Then more conventional engineering, consulting across European retail, logistics and corporate payments for the likes of Carrefour, Fiat and NCR. Different industries, one recurring problem: systems that had outgrown the assumptions they were built on.
When web technologies took off I built for Cable & Wireless, Kurt Geiger, Boohoo and William Hill, a lot of it through the agency Inviqa. Performance, scale and reliability, usually with someone else's peak trading day as the deadline.
Just Eat, Skyscanner, Schroders, and now Build Circle. The job grew to include creating the conditions in which a team can build something good, though I've never put the tools down. Build Circle also sends me out to consult, lately for the likes of News UK and PayPoint.
All of this goes back to a long love affair with PHP. I still love the language, just less religiously than when I started.
A generator for Ansible provisioning aimed at PHP development environments. I ended up its maintainer after one especially busy October, and have been perennially behind on its upkeep ever since.
Manage and switch between multiple PHP versions per project, the way rbenv does for Ruby.
Builds and installs PHP versions from source. The engine PHPenv leans on to do its job.
A micro-framework stitched together from Symfony components. Barely started, probably pointless, and still around mostly because deleting it would feel like admitting defeat.
I have taken part in every Hacktoberfest since 2015, sometimes by the convenient loophole of contributing to my own projects rather than anyone else's.
Otherwise: motorsport, mostly cars. Golf when it's warm, snowboarding when it isn't, though I'd take the snowboarding all year round if the weather would only cooperate. Thrillers, usually Jeffery Deaver, and documentaries about fringe science watched with affection rather than belief. Good food and a good drink, as content with a tasting menu as the pub round the corner.
At home there's a wife I got very lucky with, who runs a rather successful aesthetics business with the social following to match, and a daughter off studying in the States. Even the maltipoos, Molly and Lulu, are photogenic enough to have their own Instagram. Which makes me the least-followed member of my own household.
In 2019 I grew and dyed my beard hot pink for Cancer Research UK. My wife has so far declined to authorise a second attempt, since it would mean going clean shaven first, which she likes even less than pink.