Timeline

I first got involved in development back in my school days, when chats within the local area networks of the city, like Net Speakerphone and mIRC, were popular. I became interested in how sites work and I tried to make my own and show it to other people on the network. It was the ugliest site in the world, built on three or four frames and used only HTML. However, at that moment, I realized that creating websites is very exciting.

One of the chat participants praised me and told me to keep learning website development. He told me what kind of things I could do with PHP, gave me the manual for PHP 3 and advised me to learn it. That became the thing I have spent all my spare time to.

The first large-scale project, as it seemed to me then, I completed at the university in 2012. It was a system of recording scientific publications. My teacher announced that a few first semesters we would be building this system using C# for educational reasons. But at the time I found myself more clever, and not seeing any reasons why I should learn something new to solve this challenge, I spent a few nights and implemented this project. But it was built on top of PHP, CSS framework - Bootstrap, and used MySQL for data storage. Thanks to Denwer that everything was already out of the box and I didn't have to configure anything myself. Of course, this my implementation was rejected.

I moved to a big city in 2015. I needed to find a job, but at that point, all I could do was websites development. That's how I found my first job as a junior developer in the online auto parts store dok.ua. There, I was dealing with the PHP framework Yii for the first time. Thanks to wise mentors, I learned how to build complex queries in MySQL, write scrapers and data parsers, work with task trackers and work in a team.

There, I began to study the ES6 standard and the javascript frameworks Angular 2 and Vue. A little later, I was already giving lectures to my employees about these technologies.

I was contacted and offered to work part-time remotely at the Australian company Aussiedev as a middle full stack developer. This is an outsourcing company that mainly develops CRM / ERP systems for companies associated with alternative energy. I agreed, passed the interview and started working in parallel at two jobs.

I left the first company because I didn`t see further growth. I tried to launch my own online sports equipment store, developed a website, an accounting system, and even sold a few products. But, unfortunately, it turned out that such goods were not in demand in our country. I started working full-time in the outsourcing company.

I was offered a major freelance project related to advertising. I needed to develop a system that would download the product feed of an online store and sync ads, which sounded pretty simple. In fact, it turned out to be quite difficult. To begin with, I had to study Google Adwords well and all its limitations. There were a lot of products in the store, and one advertising campaign could contain a limited number of ad groups, and one ad group could contain quite a few ads. Using the Yii 2 framework, I wrote an automated system that created new campaigns, groups, and ads as needed. And also enabled or disabled the desired ads. It was not so much interesting as boring and problematic. I realized that this is not for me.

I worked for a long time on a mobile application that interacted with a hardware device, a smart inverter that collected information about the generation of electricity from solar panels. Modbus protocol and working with individual bytes of information was extremely fascinating and difficult to understand, especially when Bluetooth LE limited me in many ways. Unfortunately, funding for this project has run out.

The new investor had his own development team and preferred that they continue developing the application. The problem was that they knew nothing about the hardware the application was designed for, the existing application, or the technologies it used. That's why I was hired as a consultant for this team (a consultant who also writes code).

During working in an international company, I gained a wealth of experience in communication, mentoring other developers, and also looked at React Native from a different perspective.