Andrea Bosio is one of the winners of the Vaadin Community Award 2021. Andrea started his career in software development in 1995 as a trading system software developer in the financial industry. In 2006, he started a new company in the e-commerce sector, Zero11. The company initially provided consulting services on Java EE (now Jakarta EE) and later developed an e-commerce platform called Rewix implemented with Vaadin—their official full-stack Java framework for web application development. I had the opportunity to visit them in Turin, Italy some years ago for a lecture on an impressive Vaadin training program they designed.
How do you see the software industry evolving in terms of tools for software developers?
In the mid-1990s, we were pioneers. Linux was at its beginnings, the open source industry was taking its first steps. Then, we were "forced" to work with Microsoft Frameworks and tools or Borland RAD... Now, problems are more complicated, because you have to make your apps available 24/7 and constantly scale critical services. However, tools are easier to use and manage. The complexity always appears in integration at the system level. From my point of view, software architectures are very complex nowadays. We are lucky to have services and microservices frameworks!
What's your view on the challenges that software developers face today? For example, frameworks and programming languages are constantly evolving, new technologies and methodologies are being adopted (like microservices, cloud native, serverless, k8s, DevSecOps, and others). How do developers keep up with this?
It's very tough always to be up-to-date with every single new aspect of the evolution in the software development industry. We stay updated by learning from announcements and news, making a continuous evaluation of the software and tools that we select. It's not easy always to be innovative.
For the last five years, we have had an increasing demand for new services. According to some research, the market is looking for more than 500 million new software applications in the next few years, but there is a shortage of developers. We are looking to, and interested in adopting, low-code platforms in order to increase the development speed.
How did you decide to start a software company?
We decided to start our company because we discovered needs from Italian SMB companies that wanted to start a digital transformation using web technologies. We started the company to provide software solutions. We faced a lot of challenges but the main one was to find the right developers to create a good team with a huge knowledge of OOP, deep software development understanding, and good skills in computer programming. The key to success is always to have a good mindset in order to encourage the team to stay focused on a unique goal. Vaadin is the core of our software development craftsmanship.
How did you discover Vaadin?
We were involved in a custom project for a system integrator and the requirement was to be able to write code in Vaadin 6. The choice was forced but, in the end, we were happy to develop the software using this framework. It's easy to use, secure and robust. We choose this framework for our main product because it's rigorous and requires our developers to be very precise, supported by its type-safety features.
I bet the company will continue to be successful! Andrea, thanks for your time. Congratulations on the Vaadin Community Award and thank you also for being an active member of the community.
Thank you!