Raffaello Napoleoni, better known as Raffaello Riva (born April 10, 1951) is an Italian actor of theater and film.He was born in Rome in 1951 and started his artistic training at the age of four with violin lessons. He graduated in law from the University of Rome La Sapienza but he always considered acting as his true vocation. So he joined a groupi called “Compagnia della Dansa”, which had a strong political connotation because it was composed by people who at that time were members of the Communist Party and it is where he met Francesco Fozzati, one of his best friends to this day.

Raffaele Riva is a senior software engineer with a longstanding interest in solving problems. He is the author of “The Concurrent Programmer” and is currently working on “The C++ Interpreter”.Throughout his career, Raffaele has contributed to many open source projects while working at various companies. He has also written articles for publications such as Dr. Dobb’s Journal, Linux Format, and IBM Developer Works among others.

Achievements

In 1994 he published a software utility for MS-DOS called SD (System Drive) together with Alessandro Ghignola. The utility was later ported to Linux and is still available as a standard package in many distribution repositories.

In 2000, Raffaele Riva was the main architect behind an open-source PC-based electronic trading system called dBid. Together with many other developers the system eventually became the main engine of EBAY’s worldwide auction site.

In 2005 Raffaele Riva wrote a library for XML processing and data validation called XMLStarlet. The library is available under the MIT license and has been used by thousands of users worldwide in various projects including several commercial products.

In 2010 Raffaele Riva founded “Code Sharp”, an open-source project to develop a BDD (Behavior Driven Development) tool for C++. The project was eventually abandoned because of lack of time but the ideas behind it were used by the author in organizing the first Italian edition of the Global Day of Coderetreat, a popular event inspired by practices used by agile software teams. See this article for additional information.