Author

Ernest

Backend Engineer, API Platform, Zyte

Ernesto Hilvano is a Backend Engineer on Zyte's API Platform team, building the distributed systems behind Zyte's large-scale web crawling platform and supporting its ML-based data extraction services. He develops and troubleshoots Kafka applications in Java, Scala and Python, owns new features from design through to implementation, and tackles scalability, reliability, security and multi-tenancy challenges. Outside work he built Pikuball, an open-world multiplayer pickleball game for iOS, Android and the browser.

Ernesto Hilvano smiles to camera on a video call, with a Pikuball match playing behind him: two anime-style players on a teal court in a blossom-filled garden, the scoreboard reading Kristianst 0, Tomokawata 2.

Tool-assisted coding

What building an open-world pickleball MMO for my unborn baby taught me about infrastructure scalability

It was just a silly game side project. But, as I grew my sim to 3,000 matches, I levelled up on edge routing, flattening memory spikes and hardcore monitoring.

ErnestSeptember 9, 2026