I first met Valentino Picotti when I supervised his bachelor project and today I am very excited and proud to share that he successfully defended his PhD dissertation "Language Support for
#Microservices Development". It has been a pleasure to work with him and be his supervisor together with @fmontesi
Valentino worked on a novel type system to support the typical programming style of microservice development which combines well-defined typed APIs and manipulation of semi-structured data. The type system is unobtrusive and can be retrofitted to dynamically typed languages like Jolie.
He has also studied the problem of kickstarting a microservice architecture and proposed Sliceable Monolith: a middleground between the "Monolith First" and "Microservices First". Developers can work in a setting similar to a monolith and then use Valentino's tool to "slice" it and generate a cloud deployment.
He then focused on supporting developers during the evolution of microservice architecture and he carried out the first systematic study of _how_ API Refactoring can be introduced in an existing system. He developed a set of recipes and a framework for reasoning about the trade-offs in efficiency, maintainability, and isolation.
If you are curious about Valentino's work, check this out 👉https://doi.org/10.21996/ryyc-7h13 👈
Language Support for Microservices Development

University of Southern Denmark