Hello, I am Toma. This humble webpage's job is to shed some light on my work experience and personality.
In a nutshell I have been working as a software developer since 2012. For this period I have learned a lot about development of web applications. I have been involved in the processes of planing, developing and deploying web applications.
Problems like - estimating how much time a task will take(success rating for this is about 50%), integration of third party API's, with almost no documentation(blindly digging into the API's routes is always fun), figuring out, why something went completely wrong or completely right.
Coding I do mostly during my work hours, as I think, that every developer has to detox from programming in order to be productive the next time he/she sits down in front off the monitor. The downside of this is that, I have done almost no contribution to the open source community. A mistake I hope, I will have the time and motivation to fix.
I have mainly worked with Ruby on Rails applications and I comfortable working with the framework, but I am open to learn new and exiting things.
In my free time I like to play PC games(no consoles) and drink beer. But aside the stereotypical coder hobbies, I like cooking(you are, what you eat), snowboarding, swimming, reading books and recently I took up photography as a hobby.
Also in the past years I try to travel a bit more, then before.
The rest of the page contains a bit more detailed information on my previous jobs, education and interests.
Currently I am taking some time off work. I have to take some well earned vacation and take some time to work on myself(as they say). But this does not mean, I am not open to new opportunities.
Developing and supporting a RTB system(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Real-time_bidding) in the advertisement business. Our project was handling a lot of traffic and our main job was to keep the system stable, with low latency responses. I was involved both in developing new features for the business and also working on the infrastructure around the applications. Our main applications ware written in Node.js and this is the main technology, that we used for all our backend projects. We used a lot Redis to store some of our data, as it is really fast(but it also has it's drawbacks). An other task that we somewhat managed was to move the project to a docker environment. As a whole I was involved in most of the aspects of the project, except the some of our frontend dashboards(although I was writing the backend for them). We ware also experimenting with ElasticSearch to handle the big amount of data incoming into the system, but this yielded mixed results. Overall it was an interesting project with a lot of variety in the problems, that we needed to solve. Here I learned quite a lot from the things that we did right and the mistakes, that we made.
I was working on a Ruby on Rails application, but on a greater scale as my previous projects. Our application was a social trader platform. You could sign up and trade on the FOREX marked and also check, how other people are trading and learn from them. Here, working with some really good coders, learned a lot of best practices of the programming world. The whole application stack consisted of a big monolithic rails application, a line of in-house micro(written in NodeJS and Golang) and third party service integrations. We also had mobile application, which pulled data from the monolith, using a JSON API. I was mostly working on the rails application and problems related with it, but I had to write a few microservices solving in-house problems. We had a decant code review procedure and height code standards. Also it was a delight to work with such wonderful people, as everybody was friendly and ready to help. But after some time our team started to disperse and I decided to follow.
During this period I worked on a startup, aiming to develop smart power switches. I worked on a web page, witch had to manage profile information and admin the power switch devises. A ruby(rack) microservices accepted data from the devices and also could send commands to them, this way switching the power switch on/off. During this period I also helped as an assistant in a programmer ruby course we did for people with small technical background, who wanted to take up programming.
This was my first work as a professional developer. Our application was a Ruby on Rails project and we did all the work related with developing and supporting such a project(developing, testing, deploying, etc). The product was a web platform for car insurance brokers. The main feature of the software was the ability to compare insurance policy prices of different insurance company. It did this by taking the parameters of a vehicle and send this info to the insurance companies using their API's. The hard work was to integrate those API's into our system as they ware quite outdated and most of them ware not so good documented. Our team consisted of at first of three and then five coders, mostly inexperienced and we did some of things on the trail and error principle. I did learn a lot from our mistakes, but we also did a lot of things right, we had a decent build and deploy process(although we lacked testing) and the product was stable.
Our company was hired to support hardware and software issues for the Height Court of Bulgaria. My job was to fix trivial Microsoft Windows and hardware problems. Problems like broker printers, explain basic usage of all kinds of windows software products to nontechnical people and admin most of the computers of judges/administration staff. During this time I trained my `people` skills and patience. I worked part-time as was going to a university at that time. There ware periods, which we didn't have a lot of work and I used this time to learn programming. I did basic programming tutorials on Ruby/PHP/Javascript.
* I have written in a few other languages, used a lot of other frameworks and technologies(python, elixir, react, sinatra, rack, docker, kubernetes and others) and I do wish to learn more new things. I don't list them as skills, as I don't consider them the best developed tools in my belt.
** Also I work primary with unix-based systems and probably won't soon switch to windows as my working machine any time soon.
Swimming is something I don't do very often nowadays, but when I do it helps me relax and let some steam out.
For most of the people winter is the season of lethargy, of eating a lot of tasty food and sitting in front of a fireplace. For me it is a time of sliding down snowy slopes, admiring the white colored scenery and letting your self to the speed of a piece of wood anchored to your feets.
Reading is a big part of my life, as it helps me relax and brighten my horizons. Fiction pulls me into other worlds, worlds often very different from our own, worlds with interesting people and creatures, just worlds, which we can experience only through our imagination. And living through those stories, we learn how to better perceive our own lifes. Non-fictional books are also important, they teach us how are own world is structured and how other real people deal with problems, some big, some small. Combining the knowledge, I think, makes us better people.
To capture a moment in time is something wonderful, when you get the right one. In the past few years, I started to travel a lot more and photography was just something I enjoy doing, when I am at an unfamiliar place. It just feels good, when you capture a concealed smile or the majesty of a mountain.
Cooking is something I don't do to feed myself, but to treat myself. Although it takes time the food is far more tasty and fulfilling, if you prepare it yourself. Also we are, what we eat, so it is a good thing to know, what is in your meal.
Gaming was a big part of my life, maybe the reason I started to learn computer technologies. I still play some games with friends, mostly after work.
Board games are even more fun then computer games. In the last few years I played a lot of them and every one of them has brought me hours of entertainment. Bring some friends and battle them in a game of luck, wits or bout. This is time well spend.