Marcello La Rocca – Data Visualization and Applied Research Engineer #112

Develomentor

Welcome to another episode of Develomentor. Today's guest is Marcello La Rocca.

Marcello La Rocca is a research scientist and a full-stack engineer focused on optimization algorithms, genetic algorithms, machine learning and quantum computing. He has contributed to large-scale web applications at companies like Twitter and Microsoft, has undertaken applied research in both academia and industry. He also authored the Neatsort adaptive sorting algorithm.

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A note from Grant

Joining us from Zurich, Switzerland, our guest today, Marcello La Rocca, has held down a large variety of roles in the software industry over the years, including full stack engineer, data visualization engineer, backend engineer, game programmer, and most recently, applied Research Engineer.

Marcello has held those roles at companies like Microsoft, SwiftIQ, Twitter and Apple. Marcello has even taught computer science in high school on two different occasions. In addition to his day job, he is a prolific blogger and the author of Manning Publications “Algorithms and Data Structures in Action”.

-Grant Ingersoll

Quotes

My main job was creating nice meaningful visualization using javascript. Where there is data we have to figure out ways to present it to the customers where they can understand it very easily or at least get a grasp of how they were doing.”

“When I moved to twitter I felt it [imposter syndrome] very strongly. I was afraid of asking questions because I thought I would look bad.”

“I feel like discussing things with other engineers is one of the best perks of especially large companies. It’s also one of the ways you can learn better from your mistakes and from other people’s experiences.”

—Marcello La Rocca

Key Milestones

1. What does a Data Visualization engineer do?
2. Marcello is the author of Algorithms and Data Structures in Action by Manning Publications. What’s the book about and who is it for?
3. How will tech and more specifically data visualization engineering change in the next couple of years?
4. Marcello got imposter syndrome when he started at Twitter. How did he deal with this?

Additional Resources

Algorithms and Data Structures in Action – by Marcello La Rocca

You can find more resources in the show notes
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