Alberto Paro is an engineer, project manager, and software developer. He currently works as a CTO at Big Data Technologies and as a freelance international consultant on software engineering for big data and NoSQL solutions. He loves to study emerging solutions and applications mainly related to Big Data processing, NoSQL, natural language processing, and neural networks. He began programming in BASIC on a Sinclair Spectrum when he was eight years old, and he has a lot of experience of using different operating systems, applications, and programming languages.
In 2000, he graduated in computer science engineering from Politecnico di Milano with a thesis on designing multiuser and multidevice web applications. He assisted the professors at the university for about a year. Then, he came in contact with The Net Planet Company and loved their innovative ideas; he started working on knowledge management solutions and advanced data mining products. In the summer of 2014, his company was acquired by Big Data technologies, where he currently works and uses mainly Scala and Python on state-of-the-art Big Data software (Spark, Akka, Cassandra, and YARN). In 2013, he started freelancing as a consultant for Big Data technologies, machine learning, and Elasticsearch.
In his spare time, when he is not playing with his children, he likes to work on open source projects. When he was in high school, he started contributing to projects related to the GNOME environment (gtkmm). One of his preferred programming languages is Python, and he wrote one of the first NoSQL backends on Django for MongoDB (Django-MongoDB-engine). He is also a fan of the Scala language and enjoys spreading his love of technology: he was a presenter of Big Data concepts at Scala Day Italy 2015 on Scala.JS and Big Data Tech Italian Conference in Florence.
In 2010, he began using Elasticsearch to provide search capabilities to some Django e-commerce sites and developed PyES (a Pythonic client for Elasticsearch), as well as the initial part of the Elasticsearch MongoDB driver. He is the author of ElasticSearch Cookbook and ElasticSearch Cookbook Second Edition as well as a technical reviewer of Elasticsearch Server, Second Edition, and the video course, Building a Search Server with ElasticSearch, all of which have been published by Packt Publishing.