Whether this brings back fond memories or you're experiencing Windows 95 for the first time, you've landed on my interactive portfolio! Feel free to click around, have fun navigating it, and discover the hidden easter eggs along the way ٩(◕‿◕｡)۶
Mario Mignemi
Software Engineer — Backend Specialist, Java / Spring Boot
OPEN TO WORKHow I approach backend engineering:
Explore to uncover all 4 case studies!.
Mario Valerio David Mignemi
Born 1994 · Italian · Vienna, Austria
~7–8 years backend (Java / Spring Boot specialist)
~10 years total IT (includes brief frontend & some Node.js)
Career path (anonymized, no employer names): intern (2017) → consulting Milan (2017–18) → consulting Vienna (2018–19) → consulting (2019–20) → non-consulting employer (2020–21) → senior Java developer role ending 2024.
Testing: At every company he asked for permission to write tests — granted every time. Rarely sees others write them. Prefers integration tests that exercise the full Spring stack; accepts the speed trade-off because they catch cross-layer issues unit tests miss.
Open for full-time or long-term (1+ year) contract. Remote preferred, not mandatory.
Main skills
- Java, Spring Boot, Spring Security
- Docker (containerizes his own services)
- SQL, NoSQL, JPA / Hibernate
- Kafka, event-driven development, microservices
- JUnit, Mockito, Spring integration tests, Testcontainers
Backend / Java / Spring Boot specialist only. Partnering with frontend and DevOps teams is an intentional specialization choice.
- Italian — native
- English — fluent
- German — advanced (companies have asked him to conduct entire interviews in German)
- Spanish — advanced
- French — basic
- Japanese — basic
Certifications (2025, after last employment), via Baeldung:
- Advanced Spring Security Core — completed
- Advanced Spring Security OAuth2 — in progress
He has never used AI professionally (last role ended before ChatGPT’s release). Real AI usage is on the personal Unity game project:
- Test scaffolding: new to Unity testing (little documentation exists), he asked AI for example tests. The examples were mediocre quality but useful as a starting point.
- Asset recovery: when the Unity project broke (missing scene-file references), he had AI analyze the broken references and cross-reference Git history to recover the removed files — a mechanical, low-judgment task he deliberately delegated.
He can also run AI agents locally and uses API aggregator platforms that provide unified access to multiple AI models.
How I Work
The three strengths that appear throughout the case studies:
- Test automation (and TDD where it fits) — asked for permission to write tests at every company; granted every time. Prefers integration tests that exercise the full Spring stack.
- Finding and fixing performance issues (profiling-driven) — uses tools such as VisualVM to isolate slow methods rather than guessing.
- Precision / quality over quantity — careful concurrency reasoning, safe refactoring practices, and explicit trade-off decisions.
I led technical deep-dives on:
- Clean Code — Robert Martin's Clean Code to promote development best practices.
- Java Streams — When parallel streams beat traditional for-loops (and when they don't), backed by benchmarks.
Want to read my blog later? Catch my articles on Dev.To: https://dev.to/mario_mignemi
