I am looking for jobs that challenge me in positive ways. What delights me are complex problems and large sites, with many users and page views.
I speak about software architecture at conferences in Europe and Asia. In my spare time, I blog about my crazy side projects and give a hand in the community through initiatives like Andela, a company that provides work and mentorship to African developers.
Leaving a positive footprint is important to me.
I earned my chops on a ZX Spectrum, which I love to bits, and I am entirely self taught. I love learning stuff and practicing my trade. Whatever the coding topic, it's probably something I'd love to chat about.
2019–today
I built a software consulting business supporting start-ups, scale-ups and established company modernzie and scale their business and product to support large loads and numbers of users
I started as a solo consultant and built a business of 12 people. Some of our customers are companies with approximately 100 million users processing billions of transactions per week.
2017–2019
Totpal is the world's leading remote work force company. We enable the top 3% developers to work for the best companies remotely.
First Engineering Manager to join the company, and now the first Technical Product Manager. I work with the CEO, CTO and VP of Engineering to create a great engineering department, with a fantastic culture, great skills and top-notch code quality. In addition to producing and coding full time, I speak at various conferences and attend community events to promote remote work and our great engineering culture.
2013–2017
Stack Overflow is one of the global top 30 web sites, and the most important destination for developers worldwide. It currently has 1.2 billion page views per month, and has over 13,000,000 questions.
“Valued associate” in the core team taking care of new development and maintenance of the main Stack Overflow site and its meta site, all the network sites, and various other things like apps, etc.
Besides programming and performance tuning, I also contribute by speaking at various conferences and attending community events, like job fairs, as a representative of Stack Exchange.
Features that I've done solo or significantly contributed to:
2011–2013
Trayport is the European leader in software for commodity trading, in particular for energy, coal, emissions and oil.
I lead the development and maintenance of a series of large .Net projects such as our pre-trade, real time risk application, Trayport EMA Gateway.
EMA Gateway was a back-end system validating trader actions against a set of complex rules in real time. All the rules were managed centrally by a third party via a web interface. The application was based on WCF services and was a low-latency system (7ms latency on trades).
2009–2011
Sophos is UK's most prominent anti virus developer and enterprise security vendor.
My work at Sophos consisted in providing technical and architectural leadership for a large part of the web presence, hands on development and third level support.
The main Sophos web application was built using Sitecore on a service oriented architecture with WCF web services. The application was load tested to support 1 million registered users and thousands of active browsing users. Since it was deployed, the application has resisted multiple attacks by malicious hacker groups, such as Lulzsec and Anonymous. The system included a bespoke product credential system and a bespoke secure single-sign-on API.
1998–2008
I supported this European web agency from a 70 people start-up to a 700 people IPO'd company first as a senior developer and then as an architect running multi-country projects and building web development teams.
I worked on any major platform, supporting creating the web presence for world-wide famous brands such as The Coca-Cola Company, Heineken, Airbus, Ferrero, Kitchen-Aid, American Tourister, J&B, and many others such as national newspapers and telephone companies.
I have given many talks over the past five years in front of thousands of people. A full list of my talks is available. For example,
DotNext is the premier Russian conference on the .Net ecosystem. I have two main room talks, one about the architecture of Stack Overflow and the other about the optimization of our tag query service, from SQL to CUDA.
DotNext Helsinki is a small extension of the main Moscow conference held at the wonderful Microsoft Nokia headquarters. I gave a small audience version of the architecture of Stack Overflow talk.
JSConf Asia is one of the biggest developer conferences in Singapore. I talked about the architecture of Stack Overflow to a few hundred enthusiastic developers.
I am active as a blogger and on the Stack Exchange network. As a blogger, some of my post were featured on the home page of Hacker News and received good feedback.
Some popular blog posts:
In the Stack Exchange network I wrote many highly upvoted (100+) posts, both prior and during my tenure as a Stack employee.
For three years now I've held a mentorship position at Andela
The Andela mentorship connects Western mentoring developers with African mentees. I am very happy to help people in developing countries improve their skills as knowledge can and should be freely donated for the betterment of all, especially for those who have less opportunities.
I have been writing up some of my algorithms and data structure lessons as ongoing blog posts.
Programming is my job but also my passion. I work on computer and technology related projects in my spare time all year round. Here are a few of my recent ones.
Blasteroids is an 80's arcade space shoot-em-up, adapted to modern times. It's still an early alpha as the game is missing features, however it is fully playable and fun! The game is written in vanilla JavaScript. It works only on desktops.
I wanted to understand how transistors are assembled to make gates and how gates are assembled to make usable computer parts. I am attempting to build a computer from scratch and blogging about it.
z80 is, unsurprisingly, a z80 emulator library, written in C# using TDD. I am a huge fan of this CPU and its assembly language and developing it was a pleasure.