Radovan - PHP Developer, DevOps enthusiast

My name is Radovan but English speaking people usually call me Rad. I was born in Slovakia and I am now in early 40s. I work and live with my family near Birmingham in UK.

I am holder of various industry highly valued and recognised certifications issued by AWS, e.g. AWS Certified Developer Associate, AWS Certified Solution Architect Associate, and AWS Certified DevOps Engineer Professional.

In few words

I laugh often. I help when I notice somebody needs helping.

I have 13+ years of experience in web development and operations. Worked on systems built in the cloud to scale in a blink of one’s eye. Systems for millions (25+ m) of users. I do not get scared by microservices, serverless, fire in data-center or screaming product manager. I do not shout.

I am full stack developer. Comfortable working in Agile team or as a solo developer. Keen to learn new things and adapt to new challenges. Willing to listen and get inspired by young developers or seasoned geeks alike. I have led small team once or twice.

Experience earned and valued

My daily job is with large software company - www.kainos.com/who-we-are , which provides digital technology solutions that allow organisations and people to work smarter, faster, better. They work in government, finance and health.

I have also worked for medium sized fundraising company - easyfundraising.org.uk , which is devoted to raising money for good causes such as schools, charities, sports clubs, religious groups, community groups and more. Company helped thousands of good causes and charities raise money for free. They engage with over 3,700 retailers and so far they’ve raised over £31 million for causes throughout the UK.

I mainly focused on serverless and performance improvements and code debugging, database optimization but also systems design, and I designed and developed few APIs.

In the past I used to work for small publishing company with big online following called 3dtotal.com , based in Worcester, lovely medieval city in the Midlands. Company is well known for supporting both aspiring and seasoned 3d artists, developers, enthusiasts and professionals devoted to 3d and 2d graphics. Company supplies high quality 3d materials, textures, tutorials, books, workshops and learning materials for computer graphics (CG) community. They host active forums and online galleries showcasing the best of 3d / 2d artists work.

As an enthusiast LAMP (Linux Apache MySQL PHP) developer I also helped various advertising companies and creative studios to deliver bespoke applications for their clients. I occasionally manage Linux servers, relational and NoSQL databases for selected clients and devote my time to DevOps.

Programming - my passion

I live and breath the code. I love open source. I believe there is no greater satisfaction than watching computer follow your instructions and give you results exactly as predicted by your code design. Job well done!

  • Backend web development - JavaScript, Node.js, PHP, Python, Golang, Java
  • Frontend - HTML5, CSS3, Javascript, JQuery, Ajax
  • Linux, servers administration, orchestration, automation - Ansible, Nginx, OpenResty, Terraform, containers, Kubernetes
  • Security and crypto
  • Experimenting with general purpose programming - Lua (OpenResty), Fsharp, Golang, Scala

DevOps and Agile - my strength

  • DevOps, Ansible, terraform, bash, Python scripting
  • Kubernetes, Docker and the cloud
  • Linux server administration
  • Keen interest in Software Architecture
  • Failover design, backup strategy, high availability, scalability
  • Serverless, OS based virtualization, containers, Kubernetes, orchestration
  • DNS management
  • Networking

Beginnings

I founded lucasoft.sk in 2001 right after graduation to create brand for my freelancing. Nowadays I live and work in United Kingdom. I often worked as a freelancer or consultant sometimes cooperating with other developers or digital agencies. Quite a lot of my work had to do with optimization or code refactoring after third parties (or tweaking open-source applications) mainly to refresh old projects and bring new features and functionality to applications.

I usually focus on back end development, DevOps and mentoring less experienced developers.

Future

It’s no secret that technology trends move fast. The tools and means for building and working with information technology evolve constantly. Despite clear trend towards automation and advances in Artificial Intelligence I still believe that demand for good programmers will only increase.

Mobile first and the cloud have become the new normal and standard. In order to keep up I would like to spend more time on few things:

  • Focus on software architecture and best practices, microservices and big time serverless
  • Make multi cloud and hybrid integral part of my work
  • Performance driven development
  • Eye on scalability, concurrency and messaging systems
  • Experiment with functional languages
  • More time devoted to frontend, progressive web apps