Hi! My name is Phil Giammattei.
That's pronounced
Experience
Currently I am an Infrastructure Engineer at PNC, where I build out new features for their Continuous Delivery Pipeline. My work helps thousands of software teams deploy their code, and it’s taught me a lot about containerization, standardization, and automation at an enterprise scale. I especially like writing Groovy code, which is the language that should have been called “Java Script,” if you ask me.
Simultaneously, I’m returning to my roots as a web developer, making intensely handcrafted and personal web sites for myself and for clients, as part of the still-ramping-up Tiger Pajamas Web Site Company, along with my good friends Ashley and Jon. This web site is a result of design and values discussions that I’ve had with my colleagues, and represents a big step toward making my online identity more embodied and unique.
Prior to my work at PNC I was a React-on-Rails developer at Inventables, a CNC company with deep inroads in the consumer and small business space, improve their Easel in-browser design/CAD/CAM software and helped break ground on their Easel Cabinetmaker product for professional cabinetmakers. I had a blast in this fast-paced environment, constantly exploring the space between software and physical objects and gaining a solid understanding of Ruby backend architecture and React state management.
Before that, I was a UI Engineer for Clarivate, a large company with many products serving important niches in the Information Economy. I served on an “internal consulting” team of UI experts, assisting in UI overhauls of legacy apps and drove initial development on their Brand Landscape Analyzer product. Working heavily with Angular, Gatsby, and Material components, I led efforts to inculcate a culture of software best practices, including code review, pair programming, and Contract-Driven Development.
Prior to Clarivate I was at PNC in a different stint, doing Angular and Spring development for their Asset Management Group division. My team broke ground on a content-based microservice for their wealth management app that displayed external data with JavaScript-based visualizations.
That was my first job after attending the Tech Elevator coding boot camp. Up until then I was the Operations Manager for KerfCase, a luxury E-Commerce shop that hand-makes phone cases machined from blocks of wood. Along with overseeing production, order fulfillment, and customer service, one of my responsibilities was maintaining and enhancing their site, which is built on Shopify and constitutes the company’s sole sales channel. I learned a lot about nitty-gritty web development here, picking up jQuery and the Liquid template syntax Shopify uses, along with pulling off some very gnarly CSS hacks to get everything looking good. I write more about this experience here.
Before that, I did a lot of tech-adjacent things for a lot of tech-centered companies, like sales for Oracle, data analysis at Google, and all-around helpful presence at the Apple Store.
During undergrad, I bounced around schools and majors like a pinball, eventually being launched from the University of Pittsburgh with a Religious Studies degree, with many non-applicable credit hours sunk into computer science and music courses. I also learned some Spanish.
Skills and Interests
My eclectic education and work history is difficult to form a coherent story from. Never content to commit myself to a worn path, I have consistently prized versatility over virtuosity and continue that tradition as a generalist software engineer with competencies in design, business, and support. I wouldn’t have it any other way.
Part of the fun of software is getting to Automate The Boring Parts, and DevOps is such a fun practice ground for automation at scale. It’s very fun to put man hours or dollar amounts to the work you do, because it adds up quickly, and there’s always room for improvement. My work in large enterprise infrastructure scratches an itch to make things more efficient.
Paradoxically, this work has heightened my awareness of what we lose when we automate and scale too aggressively or imprecisely, and most of my free time on the computer is spent talking and working with people who are thinking about how to revitalize online spaces, away from centralized services and platforms and on small web sites that are owned by a single person or a trusted group. The #indieweb movement is growing on places like Mastodon, and it’s a lot of fun to go on internet safaris to people’s little patches of web like it’s the 90s again. I hope that this is a fun stop for some of you!
As generative AI invades the world, I’m experimenting with its utility as a pair programming buddy, and looking on with amusement at failed attempts to use it to replace genuine human creativity. One reason I spent a lot of time on this site was that I wanted to make something that no machine ever could.
Personal Life
I live in Pittsburgh with my wife and daughter and two cats.
I play bass for a band called Bad Custer and occasionally podcast with my friend Jesse.