One year at Arduino
Few months ago, I celebrated my first year at Arduino as CIO and Head of Software and Cloud development team. What a great excuse to share my experience in the first year!
I joined on Feb, 1st 2021 and I can say the first day was quite strange. Due to the pandemic, nobody was in the Turin office and I could meet my team only on conference call. To reduce the drama, my new boss Fabio Violante (our company CEO) decided to meet me in Turin and greet me with all the due attentions. That was a really nice sign of attention to people.
Even if I met them only over the phone, I immediately realized that the engineering team is a crew of talented, passionate, and great team players. Software developers in my team are really passionate about using leading-edge technologies, making sure our applications and digital services are well architected and designed, cloud-native on the backend, and with rich user experience on the frontend.
Around us we have a strong Hardware and Firmware team, with again a great set of talents and passionate people; the products that they have built over time are just amazing and filled with innovation and love.
Not to mention the strong User Experience team where all the UX and UI magic happen.
I love how the office is reflecting the different souls in engineering: the software team has (almost) clean desks, maybe with a can of soda or an Arduino sticker; the hardware team has oscilloscopes and soldering tools; the UX team… well they just have beautiful desks…
But the office is not the only space where we meet; a good portion of the team is working remotely so we have fun online too. The team came up with a virtual “Happy Hour” meeting where we meet and chat about technologies and software trends. The engineering team is also doing internal workshops to present solutions, design ideas, and discuss technology in general (yes, it’s quite nerdy stuff).
We love technical discussions not only about how things should be done, but mostly about what will the user experience be. This is a strong value at Arduino, i.e. trying to think about the user experience and the value for users in everything we do.
Another thing that I love about Arduino is the Open Source culture; I know it’s expected, given the history of our company, but we really love Open Source. Many companies can say they love OS in the sense that they consume OS, but we are among those that can say they heavily contribute to OS. If you want to know more, this is a great summary and this is a recent article.
We adopted a public Request-For-Comment approach for some of our projects, to gather feedback from our users even during early design stages. Even when we decide that it’s not worth sharing a piece of code as Open Source, we internally use an RFC process to gather feedback on design, and we diligently use Code Reviews to ensure many eyes are reviewing a change before it’s applied. Modern CI/CD practices allow us to work with agility and continuous delivery in mind.
Last, but not least, we are a truly open, collaborative, inclusive environment that aims to promote inclusivity in all senses. It was a great inspiration for me to hear Massimo Banzi, one of our founders, talking about how we can help Sustainable Development Goals such as “Quality Education” and “Industry, Innovation and Infrastructure”. There are amazing projects out there realized by Arduino lovers that foster Innovation and can improve life for real people. See some examples in the recordings of our last Arduino Week celebration.
I can say Arduino has a lot of startup spirit, but also we are transforming and maturing, with new business lines and stronger products. We continuously challenge ourselves to build high quality, great UX, and meaningful value for our users.
By now I think you can tell that, after one year, I feel lucky and proud to work at Arduino.
If you want to experience life at Arduino, come and join us, check out open positions here.
