The Beginnings
I started programming in 5th grade, and I built a web app for tracking homework. As ugly and buggy as it was, I will never stop being proud of this monstrosity. Soon after, I learned the basics of frontend, backend, and databases - which allowed me to build a PHP-based social platform at the age of 14.
The biggest challenge I faced was querying a database for users that were inactive for more than 5 minutes. I simply couldn’t comprehend user.activeAt >= now - 5min, and it took me multiple weeks to implement this.
Websites weren’t my thing, so I switched to gaming and developed many addons, mods, and even standalone games. While exploring Unity, my backend skills backed me up (pun intended) to implement multiplayer and realtime interactions with Colyseus websockets.
As silly as it sounds, even Minecraft servers got a lot of networking complexity under the hood. My greatest achievement was a proxy on top of auto-scaling stateless instances of servers using CloudNet, allowing support for as many players as imaginable (for me and all my 3 friends).
Software slowly became boring, and I became interested in microcontrollers. Arduino and Raspberry Pi gave me a basic understanding of the Internet of Things, and allowed me to automate my homeworks for technical drawing by making a plotter drawing machine.
It took me multiple dead SD cards and many burned LEDs to understand the basics of current, voltage, and resistance. While not relevant in my career path, knowing electronics allows me to understand the boundaries of technologies and how to connect them.
As you can see, my beginnings were all over the place. For a long time, my source of passion wasn’t mastering a skill, but learning what technologies are capable of and finding their (and my) limits. But slowly, I settled.
Settle and optimize
Over the years, I realized I want to make an impact. I want to build tools, help teachers, students, friends. Everyone. I quickly understood that the most commonly used platform is a web browser, so I aimed most of my focus on web development, becoming a fullstack developer in the process.
My very first work experience was a 1-year part-time job building an e-commerce store with a Node.js-based backend and React frontend.
This was the most stressful time of my career. Not only did I face many programming challenges, it was also my first time building in a collaborative team, under pressure of deadlines, and the weight of responsibilities to deliver features to customers. It feels boring talking about it now as an adult, but my teenage self had a hard time.
The most interesting problem I faced was dealing with large nested category trees. To prevent recursive search through the database, I implemented nested sets. Making it fast and memory-efficient wasn’t an easy task for a self-taught developer who had never heard of big O notation before.
After graduating from school and becoming a freelancer, I found out that speed of development is what makes me money. Throughout a year of freelancing, I developed Fullstack Boilerplate, a web app starter kit with most of the processes automated. Soon after, when I realized it was hell to maintain such a project, I was faced with a hard decision - do I continue development of my starter, or do I become dependent on someone else’s technology?
I chose to use Appwrite, since it was open-sourced, and their GitHub repository provided everything I needed to be as confident with Appwrite as I was with my own boilerplate.
It didn’t take long before I started contributing to the community, and later to the source code as well. A magical thing happened when I made my first pull request - removing random 5-second slowness in serverless functions. The founder of Appwrite reached out to me with a job interview offer and an opportunity to become a core member of Appwrite with a full-time contract.
Welcome to Open source
Appwrite was the opportunity of my life. My GitHub graph never looked cleaner, and I built dozens of free applications. I learned to work with every major runtime (Bun, C++, Dart, .NET, Go, Java, Kotlin, Node.js, PHP, Python, Ruby, Swift) and every major framework (Angular, Analog, Flutter, Next.js, Nuxt, Remix, SvelteKit). I also had the opportunity to work on Appwrite Cloud and learn architecture management with Terraform, and Docker cluster orchestration with Docker Swarm.
As part of marketing efforts (which be the way, when working at startup, expect to become expert at everything), I built clone of Reddit Place canvas, an event allowing everyone around the globe to make permanent contribution to a painting. After sharing it on social media, our application went viral and within 24 hours I learned to scale to millions visitors and thousands of active users. While this was perfect opportunity for Appwrite backend to show what it’s capable of, it was also one of my proudest moments as it allowed me to prove to others, and myself, what I am capable of.
Below you can find rendered history of our Canvas over couple of days, including dozens of millions of actions.
The biggest achievement by far was a 0-downtime migration when I migrated hundreds of thousands of projects across a couple of databases with billions of records into new databases, changing data structure in the process. The transfer was done while still serving tens of millions of requests, and the migration was a success with only a 0.015% failure rate that was migrated with downtime afterwards, after confirming it with the affected organizations.
I’m proud of the 0-downtime migration because it allowed me to learn how to develop critical parts of applications safely. Before launching the feature, it was heavily tested, benchmarked, and simulated. I included validation scripts for every step with the ability to retry, rollback, or recover. With this experience, I gained confidence in critical thinking when it comes to preventing downtime.
As much as I would love to include some visuals from this migration, I respect privacy and security of the this company process. Imagine small team of engineers on in-person meetup rolling back database changes because a script broke all relationships by replaicng document hexadecimal IDs with numeric IDs. The one in the middle who pressed enter, that’s me.
Project and people leadership
Thanks to my career path, I am currently able to gain experience in leading dedicated projects and leading teams of engineers. I am excited to become a great leader and grow my skills even further.