Career Profile
I’m a system architect and full-stack developer located in Riga, Latvia, and I like to design systems of any scale and complexity. I have a strong interest in creative programming, particularly generative art.
My primary expertise is in .Net and JavaScript/TypeScript areas. In recent years I became pretty good with React for building complex UIs. I’m open to new languages and technologies and expanding my knowledge stack constantly.
Personal and Freelance Projects
Outside of my regular work, I had occasionally worked on several freelance projects, where I got familiar with Shopify, Node.js, and many other tools and technologies.
In my free time, I run several small personal projects. Some achievements that are worth mentioning:
- I have created a realistic fractal game map generator with simple weather simulation for the Atlantis PBEM game;
- a Web-based game client for the Atlantis PBEM game, which includes complex Human-readable text parsing and representing results in a more digestible form for the game players;
- artistic star map poster generator;
- web crawling using Python and .Net;
- Data analytics and scientific data processing using various Python tools.
Experiences
At the end of the previous position, we established a special DevOps / Developer-oriented team where I acted as a primary stakeholder, PO, and visionary. The purpose of this team was to streamline the development of microservices and take ownership of the cross-cutting concerns like authentication. I’m entirely in charge of this team in my new position now, and all team members report directly to me.
My main goals and objectives are the same as in the previous position, but I’m also directly managing the people I work with.
Besides development activities, I have grown the organization’s architectural aspect and now manage a whole group of 7 people: 3 architects, three developers, and one product owner.
Main achievements during this period:
- I have designed base libraries and a set of project templates to streamline microservice development. The standard feature set and project templates allow other teams to bootstrap new service development in several hours. The new service will have all the typical features, like, authentication, logging, health reporting, and CI/CD. At the same time, upgrading to newer versions is just a simple package update for all the teams.
- The React-based component library streamlines UI development and maintains a common look & feel across micro-frontends and multiple teams. Multiple teams can develop and deploy their frontends independently with the single-spa micro-frontend solution I have established.
- Because we have outgrown ServiceFabric-provided capabilities, together with the infrastructure team, we have established a Kubernetes cluster within Azure. My part in the project was to design the general architecture of the K8S cluster and prepare all micro-services, code libraries, and CI/CD to support the new hosting solution.
Tools and technologies used: React, single-spa, Kubernetes, Consul, Terraform, Docker, .Net, TypeScript, MUI / MaterialUI, Nginx, Elastic Stack.
At the beginning of the position in the If P&C Insurance, IT maturity level was relatively low. I took active participation in turning a small, single IT team into a multi-team development factory.
During this period, I participated in many front-end and back-end development projects. My main objectives and goals are to work closely with development teams and business stakeholders to:
- find optimal technical solutions for the business problems;
- shape technical solutions and translate them into the backlog;
- review code and deal with non-trivial issues in production;
- plan and prioritize work;
- consult developers about different technical aspects of the tools and technologies we are using;
- plan long-term vision and strategy of the IT solutions in charge.
Main achievements during this period:
Together with a small team of developers, I developed the initial version of the cross-platform (iOS & Android) mobile application for the Health insurance product. The mobile application featured a fully custom-built digital signature solution (Advanced Digital signature by the European Union classification), which allowed us to identify application users and accept digital inquiries from them in a very secure and organic manner.
Tools and technologies used: Ionic (Cordova), asymmetric cryptography / PKI / Certificates, OCR, OAuth2 & OIDC, PDF document modification / iTextSharp, EiDAS.
Replaced legacy Windows domain-based authentication with standardized OAuth2 & OIDC bases solution; this helped streamline microservice development and allowed to use service hosting in the cloud fully.
Tools and technologies used: OAuth2 & OIDC, IdentiyServer.
Adopted Azure cloud for all new microservices development teams were building. Investigated Azure cloud capabilities, created all the needed templates and pipelines so that other development teams could use Azure for their needs, and helped them to adopt a new platform. At the time of the activity, we selected Microsoft ServiceFabric as our central platform for microservices.
Tools and technologies used: Microsoft ServiceFabric, Microsoft Azure, Kubernetes (AKS), Nginx.
Found, evaluated, prepared guidelines, and led the application delivery process automatization. We started from the state where the delivery manager manually copies new files to the server and achieved a state where 100 services can be wholly redeployed in less than 1 hour by a simple button press.
Tools and technologies used: Octopus Deploy, JetBrains TeamCity.
Breaking the monolith into loosely coupled event-based services allowed multiple teams to deliver requested business features independently, which significantly boosted overall efficiency. My role was to find the solution, evaluate different messaging solutions, prepare code samples, guide teams during transformation, review their code, and help to find optimal business and technical solutions in the new paradigm.
Tools and technologies used: RabbitMQ, Akka.Net, MassTransit.
By introducing and establishing the ELK stack (Elasticsearch, Logstash, and Kibana) based central logging solution, I significantly increased the observability of the application state in the production. This change allowed our operations and development teams to be more productive and reactive. Tools and technologies used: Elasticsearch, Logstash, Kibana.
Introducing and harmonizing development practices like pull request reviews and unit testing increased overall code quality and reduced the number of bugs delivered to production. Additionally, an automated acceptance testing, where I established Selenium and Gherkin-based toolset among the QA community, allowed us to increase overall quality. Tools and technologies used: Git, pull requests, Azure DevOps, Selenium, Gherkin.
Other tools and technologies that I used very extensively during this period: React, AngulaJS, Angular, EPiServer, JetBrains Development Tools, MUI / MaterialUI, Bootstrap, Webpack, Terraform, GraphQL.
Shortly after starting work in this position, If P&C Insurance incorporated most of the Nexum developers.
My task was to lead the development of the new generation primary insurance system for the If P&C Insurance in the Baltic region. I started to work from the beginning of this project, participated in the business requirement clarification, and created several functional prototypes. I was the team leader who implemented the new system.
The most notable achievement was configuring the majority of the insurance product aspects without conventional coding. For this purpose, I created visual programming solution to define rules and internal product behavior. Engine executed the product rules on the server and the client because we added transpilation to the JavaScript.
Tools and technologies used: ASP.NET, WCF, XAML, LINQ, LINQ Expressions, JavaScript, jQuery, abstract syntax trees.
I developed a fully-featured, full-text search engine for a corporate, custom-built CMDB/issue tracking system. The search engine allowed the 90 staff members to find the required information instantly.
Worked in entirely three projects: search engine, issue tracking enhancements, and adopted internal issue tracking system for international GNT group needs.
Enhanced issue tracking modules for external users for easier claim registration through WEB and updated new issue creating process making it more robust and powerful.
I adopted an internal issue tracker for other GNT Group members. I updated the search engine to be able to search in different countries from a single issue tracker installation.
Worked with: C#, Lucene.Net, ASP.NET, jQuery, JavaScript, WCF, and other WEB technologies.
Was part of a small team developing small websites for various customers. Developed three websites using a custom PHP framework.
Worked with: PHP, Eclipse, HTML, XML, CSS, Apache, and Photoshop.