Gabriele Brosulo

Senior Backend Developer

About

G4b0 (aka Gabriele Brosulo) has been writing software for twenty-five years: PHP backends, systems that have to hold under peak load, legacy code brought back to life. Before that, firmware in C and systems administration, which is why nothing below the application layer scares him. These days he works alongside AI agents every day. When not in front of a terminal, he's on a surfboard, on a rock face, in the mountains, or in front of a chessboard.

Profile

Computer Science graduate (Systems & Networks) from the University of Turin, with 25 years of field experience spanning software development, system administration, DevOps, and technical team leadership, often in direct contact with clients and stakeholders.

Currently senior backend developer at an online ticketing company: PHP 8, Laravel, microservice architecture, legacy system migration. Past work includes embedded firmware in C, Android development in Java, and full-stack coverage from bare metal to the browser.

KISS is a design principle, not a shortcut. Documentation comes before assumptions.

AI

He works with AI agents every day, and for the past couple of years a good part of the job has been working out how to steer them: how the context is structured, what gets delegated, where the checks belong. One rule, never negotiated: drive the model, don't be driven by it.

At work he has built himself a method: prompting conventions, clear boundaries on what gets delegated, systematic review of whatever the agent produces. Nothing reaches production without being read and tested. Out of that came the project wiki built for LLMs, which the agents keep up to date themselves and use as context: it serves the whole of development, but above all the legacy, reconstructing the behaviour of code nobody documented and guiding its migration.

Skills

backend : PHP 8, Laravel, REST API, Node.js/Express

architecture : microservices, legacy migration, Agile Scrum

cloud : AWS, Docker, CI/CD

infrastructure : Linux/UNIX, DevOps, RabbitMQ

data storage : MySQL, Redis, MongoDB, DynamoDB

languages : PHP, JavaScript, C, Java, SQL, Bash

frontend : Vue.js, HTML5, CSS3

AI : prompt engineering, agent-assisted dev, LLM context design

best practice : design patterns, SOLID, KISS, clean code

other : Git, open source

Projects

chessview.org – main developer on the Node.js/Express backend on MongoDB, with tests and continuous integration. Open source platform (AGPL) by Raphael Babilonia for publishing and following over the board chess events. [source]
Silverstripe – patches to the core of the open source CMS, published back in the years it ran in production on client projects.

Education

Bachelor's in Computer Science (Systems & Networks) – University of Turin, 2006, 102/110
Technical Diploma (Surveying) – Don Bosco Institute, Lombriasco (TO), 2000, 96/100
Continuous learning – technical docs, RFCs, release notes, open source community

Manifesto

"I do not write based on others' ideas. I don't see the world like most people do — this has been held against me for a long time! … Why should I present as doubt what I personally do not doubt at all?"

J.-J. Rousseau, Émile, or On Education (1762)