I'm Federico Macchi, a Software Engineer with a strong UI focus; passionate about cooking, cocktails and (aero)space, I love coding, creating devices, and taking part in hackathons.

I'm currently working as an Aerospace Software Engineer and Integration Specialist at TXT Group, Milan, doing projects for Leonardo Helicopters in the Training & Simulation Area. My Master Thesis is about automating the Visual Testing of Advanced Map-based Interfaces, used within the context of Flight Simulators.

My research interests are mainly related to UIs and Software Engineering/Architecture; I would like to learn more about advanced emergent User Interfaces such as Augmented/Mixed/Virtual Reality especially applied to the fields of defence and aerospace.

Need to know more? Head over to https://fedemitic.github.io/ for my complete résumé and portfolio.

Most of my repository are small ones, created to complete personal projects and school's coursework; professional projects, such as the ones described in my portfolio, are not here unfortunately :( However, if you want to have an idea about my way of coding things, you can check the following repos:

• Website (Super basic HTML, CSS, JS)
  • https://github.com/FedeMITIC/fedemitic.github.io, résumé and portfolio website - mainly HTML and CSS with some quick JS to load projects and generate cards
• Python:
  • https://github.com/FedeMITIC/RingReaderEUI, device to extract texts from images and read it back to the user with a synthesized voice (for the Aalto Course CS-E4200 Emergent User Interface)
  • https://github.com/FedeMITIC/data-analysis-project, ML project to classify songs between 10 genres
• JavaScript:
  • https://github.com/FedeMITIC/auth0-users, small package used HomebrewLab, to retrieve user data from Auth0's servers, given its JWT
  • https://github.com/Lykos94/js-draggable-console, to display a browser-like console on mobile, for quick testing of phone-gap apps (Contributed)
  • https://github.com/FedeMITIC/cli-assignment, nodeJS CLI (for the Aalto Course CS-E5220 User Interface Construction)
• C++:
  • https://github.com/FedeMITIC/MultisensoryInteractiveSystems, for the Trento Course Multisensory Interactive Systems, we realized a TUI (Tangible User Interface) to control an element (a rolling ball) on a screen (C++ used to control sensors and motors connected through Arduino, Pure Data (PD) to bridge the low-level C++ to the Processing high-level interface through OSC messages, and Processing to realize the interface shown on the computer screen)

Additionally, not included in my Github, I used Java for both my Bachelor and Master thesis.

I'm currently finishing my Master Thesis, writing tests using Java, OpenCV, TesseractOCR and Selenium APIs + HTML/CSS/JS to create a website which automatically parses and displays the results of the tests.

I'm learning Spring Boot by creating a clone of Google Keep (repo here: https://github.com/FedeMITIC/TODOsAPI)

Other things I contributed to:

• Homebrewlab (described here in Italian (Google Translate is your friend) https://hopadvisor.it/2017/08/20/homebrewlab-verso-un-software-nuovo-per-pianificare-gli-esperimenti-birrari/), current website: https://homebrewlab.cloudno.de/; I contributed to this open source app for almost two years, from the initial phases. In particular, I was the leader of the back-end team, that built the backend infrastructure, originally based on the Google Cloud Platform (with a Linux Machine). It featured:

  • a NodeJS app, with RESTful APIs
    • ExpressJS for routing and endpoints
    • Authentication realized through JWT and Auth0, and a RBAC (Role-based Access Control) library that I wrote to differentiate standard users from admins and moderators (each group had different permissions)
    • Persistence with MongoDB
    • Versioning with GitHUB
  • a reverse proxy (NGINX) to connect to the application through HTTPS only (certificate obtained from https://letsencrypt.org/)
  • PM2 (https://pm2.keymetrics.io/) to manage the process and ensure it stays up even after a crash

  Additionally, I set up the front-end to authenticate users, save their token in the local/session storage and create a small utility with functions to call the backend APIs, so that my teammates on the front-end could completely focus on the interface and user-interactions.

• AIrsound, an AI-based app built with Python in the context of a 1-month long hackathon (My team and I won the 2nd place) hosted by Leonardo (https://www.leonardocompany.com/en/home). The purpose of the application is to aid operators in performing the Tapping Test; this test verifies that a component (of an aircraft usually) is not damaged and ready to fly, by hitting its surface with a small hammer and listening to the sound produced. Through a KNN classifier, we realized this python application that can analyze the sound, retrieved using a microphone, and tell the operator if the piece is damaged or not. In particular, I realized the user interface of the software, while my team focused more on the AI part.