Samuel L. Massari
Engineering Leader - Software Developer - Knowledge Craver - Dual Citizen
World Traveler - Volleyball Player - Personal Trainer/Yoga Teacher
Engineering Leader - Software Developer - Knowledge Craver - Dual Citizen
World Traveler - Volleyball Player - Personal Trainer/Yoga Teacher
It's a bit tough to throw myself under one label. I am a leader, developer, dual US/Italian citizen, volleyball player, yoga teacher, ice cream afficionado, film nut and many other things. Basically, I just want to know more tomorrow than I did yesterday. I love learning from people who know more than me and prefer to learn via trial by fire.
Welcome to my site, where you can learn more about me, my employment past, my skills and some things about my personality. If there's something missing, feel free to message me via any of the contact points at the bottom of the page!
In my 9 years in the industry, I have worn many hats. As a developer, I took part in as much of the development lifecycle as I could, devops, frontend, backend, you name it. I am constantly trying to learn, improve and optimize.
After leaving my first company and spending a year traveling in Asia, I returned and began working as an Interview Engineer for Karat. I have always been passionate about the interview process and here I was able to hone those skills and get a deep understanding for evaluating talent.
Alongside this role, I started a full time role as a Software Engineer with Rev.com, where I focused on Customer Experience. After a year in the role, I took an odd path and started as the Chief of Staff to the EVP of Product and Engineering.
In this role, I learned from an industry veteran on how to run a successful performant engineering team. Working with 120 engineers, I worked to improve processes, bring new tools to the table and increase developer satisfaction.
The role saw me looking through metrics and finding areas the team could improve. Once I had identified an area, I would begin experimenting, testing new ideas with small pilot teams of engineers.
In the role, I revamped our entire Engineering recruiting process, improving it for candidates, recruiters and our engineers. I also revamped our engineering levels, improved developer communication and created an apprenticeship program for engineers with non traditional backgroungs, among other things.
After the CoS role, I wanted to return to the code, but found a great sense of joy in leading teams and helping individuals grow. From here, the next logical step was Engineering Manager. I led a team of varying levels consisting of 6 engineers.
As manager, I was responsible for team productivity, roadmap and the growth of individuals. I also contributed to technical discussions, code reviews and feature completion.
Ruby
Rails
Python
Django
Golang
Gin
React
Bootstrap
Postgresql
MongoDB
AWS
Git
English
Italian
Spanish
German
Certified Scrum Master, Scrum Alliance, 2018
Certified Personal Trainer, NASM, 2018
Registered Yoga Teacher, Yoga Alliance, 2019
Tools/Tech: Ruby, Rails, AWS, Heroku, Docker, Postgresql, Bootstrap, RSpec, Git, Github Projects
King-Me was my first solo attempt at a sophisticated web application. Through this site, I taught myself to use all of the tools involved. The site automates all of the logic behind running a king/queen of the beach volleyball tournament, only requiring the user to input a seeded player list and scores. Ranking, progression and match generation is all handled by the backend logic. The site is currently down due to breaking changes until I have bandwidth to revamp.
Tools/Tech: Ruby, Rails, Render, Postgresql, Sass, RSpec, Git, Trello
VisaCalc was a passion project to create a visa calculator that would tell you how many days you have left of a 90 day visa and to let you know what days you would be getting those days back. I built this quickly using Rails and the Hotwire Turbo features to make a responsive SPA for web and mobile.
Tools/Tech: Python, Flask, React, Typescript, Chakra, Render, Redis, Git, Trello
What to Watch was born from the time wasted looking for a movie to watch and wanting to try out the Chakra UI library for React. Users can quickly get suggested a movie from the top 50 movies based on their filters. Movies show title with a link to the imdb page, rating, runtime and a description of the film. Users can also view the list that the random movie is being selected from.
As much as I love to code, I like to do a ton of other things. Learning new things is my favorite thing in the world, but some of those things end up becoming mainstays. For the most part, those are travel, volleyball, and writing.
For the past 8 years, I have been traveling all over the world, putting my total countries at 39 since I started traveling in 2016. Throughout those travels, I have picked up many languages, made a ton of friends and learned about many different cultures.
Also in 2016, I started playing competitive beach volleyball. I have played in tournaments all over the world and had the privilege to train with and compete against many top players. In 2023, I represented the US in an international FIVB tournament.
When I moved to Asia in 2018, I began keeping my friends and family updated with what I was up to by keeping up with blog posts. You can find those posts at NeverEverBeBoring.com although I only add posts infrequently these days. I always enjoyed writing but it often doesn't get the priority it deserves.