One of the jurors of the next Pi Day HackParty (postponed to May 14th due to Covid-19) is Luca Rossi, co-founder and CTO at Wanderio, a startup that develops a technology to help users compare and book trains, buses, flights and transfers. Aggregating and displaying data looks simple, says Luca, but “when you get down to it, it is actually really hard!” This is how Wanderio CTO describes the tech part of the startup he co-founded: “The main goal of our technology is getting data from many suppliers, making sense of it, and returning results that are useful for the customer. We use all kinds of sources, including APIs, web scraping and manual data entry. We clean, deduplicate, and merge data with what we already have, and we run custom algorithms to return the final itineraries.“
What’s the most interesting thing you learned working at Wanderio?
Not to overthink about tools and technologies, and resisting the urge of changing for the sake of change. Instead, to spend more time improving how the team works, and on making developers productive and happy.
What are the main technologies you use at Wanderio?
Our backend is built on Ruby on Rails and makes use of MongoDB, Redis and Neo4J for storing data. Our frontend is built on React and React Native.
Why did you choose those technologies and what do you use them for?
They strike the right balance between having large, supportive communities and being on the cutting-edge of what we can expect in terms of quality and productivity. They also fit the vision we have on team working, and of course, fit the specific requirements of our product and business.
