Rovani's Sandbox

Rovani's Sandbox

About Me
Projects
If you like what you see (view the About Me page for more) and you're interested in exploring opportunities for us to partner up, please reach out to me at david@rovani.net or message me on LinkedIn #OpenToWork

Blog Posts - Page 1

How Scientists Use Lasers to Measure Farts: A Journey Down a Research Rabbit Hole

What started as research into healthy eating led me down a fascinating rabbit hole: scientists are using sophisticated laser technology to measure intestinal gas and study the gut microbiome. From diagnosing digestive disorders through breath tests to discovering that lasers can actually alter gut bacteria composition, this unexpected journey into 'photobiomics' reveals the incredible ingenuity behind studying our body's most embarrassing bodily function.

Beyond the Repository: Leveraging GitHub Features for Side Project Management

Transitioning between roles offers the perfect opportunity to refine your development workflow. In this follow-up to 'Building in Public', I explore how GitHub's project management features can transform your side project development experience. From roadmapping with Projects to tracking features with Issues, learn how these powerful tools can help maintain momentum, document decisions, and demonstrate professional-grade development practices that impress potential employers.

Building in Public: Managing Side Projects During Job Transitions

Career transitions offer a unique opportunity for hands-on technical exploration. After leaving my CTO role, I'm keeping skills sharp by building my Hero Wars Helper project in public. This post covers my strategies for maintaining momentum, prioritizing MVP over perfection, and using side projects to demonstrate ongoing technical relevance — all while navigating the job search process. For developers in transition, here's how to turn uncertainty into productive coding time.

From Clockwork to Continuous: Modernizing Our Continuing Education Platform's Architecture

In this post, I'll walk through how we are transforming our monolithic, schedule-based architecture into a modern, event-driven system that handles our CLE processing with the grace of a well-briefed legal argument. You'll learn why scheduled batch processing can create unnecessary friction in customer experience, how event-driven architecture can deliver near-real-time data processing and reporting, the step-by-step process we are using to migrate without disrupting our core business operations, and real lessons learned from managing this transformation.

CTO Leadership At Small Scale

During my first 8-months as a CTO, I learned a lot about how to be remote leader for an in-person team, navigate legacy notions of the technology landscape, and guide rising talent through the turbulence of change.