Alexandr – PHP, Symfony, Golang

This platform makes the lives of sports event organizers easier by providing a single platform for event information publishing, participants’ registration, seeding and competition bracket generation, conducting the matches, keeping track of scores and event progress.

He was responsible for R&D budget planning, interviewing and hiring developers, etc. On top of that, I often perform duties usually specific to Tech Lead, DevOps, Architect etc.

• Led the development from the concept to MVP and to a final product.
• Managed to get a production-ready feature-rich product on a minimal budget in less than a year.
• Ensured high-quality standards and best practices were implemented in order to achieve reliable and stable app operation. Halting a competition due to a bug in the app would be unacceptable.
• Implemented infrastructure management using Terraform.
• Implemented workload orchestration and service discovery with Nomad and Consul.
• Implemented CI/CD using Gitlab CI.
• Designed and developed some of the most complex backend components including the smart bracket generation.
• Designed and supervised the development of the semi-autonomous web-based referee dashboard and the scoreboard using Event Sourcing.

This solution allows you to create highly customizable personalized video messages or calls from Santa Claus. PNP is used by tens of millions users every year. It’s featured as a #1 app in Google Play / Apple App Store during the Christmas season in tens of countries worldwide and takes #2-3 places in many more countries.

As a Team Lead (February 2020 – December 2020):

• Successfully migrated the backend to Swoole achieving a significant performance improvement.
• Leaded API migration to gRPC and Protobuf. The use of Protobuf made it easier for Frontend and Backend developers to communicate when designing API.
• Developed a library to handle gRPC requests in PHP (translated from Go).
• Introduced “API contract first” approach in contrast to the old “Backend generates the API spec” approach. It ensured that both Frontend and Backend teams got involved in the process leading to better API design overall.
• Introduced layered architecture concepts to some of the most complex parts of the backend, which increased testability and overall stability of the system.

As a Backend Developer (May 2017 – February 2020):

• Implemented the use of RabbitMQ to offload operational tasks to worker servers.
• Implemented backend support for auto-renewable subscriptions for iOS and Android (Google Play Store).
• Upgraded the project over time: Symfony 2, 3, 4
• Implemented caching with Redis.
• Analyzed app performance using various tools including Blackfire and New Relic. Implemented major performance optimizations. Achieved dramatic response time improvement thanks to better design and caching (150ms down to 10ms on some endpoints)
• Heavily refactored, unified and optimized unit and functional tests. Reduced tests execution time from 30 to 10min.
• Implemented GDPR and CASL compliance features.

Various small projects.

• Worked intermittently between my contracts as a seafarer.
• Made some coding experience (as a hobby) in the past I started doing freelance jobs.
• Managed to improve my skills quite fast.
• Learnt Symfony Framework.
• Went full-time as a freelance PHP Software Developer after quitting my last job at sea.

One of the largest international food and beverage corporations (NDA). The project is a migration of all of the brands’ websites to Symfony as a new corporate standard. Original projects were written in mostly PHP and used different frameworks, CMSes or custom solutions.

• Assisted with proper migration to Symfony 3 and PHP 7 implementing the best development practices.