About me

I'm Vot; I'm a programmer (or software developer/designer/engineer/architect) based in Cambridge, UK.

I've worked in academic publishing for a decade, including positions of Head of Platform Solutions for Cambridge Core Frontend at Cambridge University Press, Technical Architect on Project Octopus and UI Developer on ProQuest Search platform.

I consider myself a "general purpose programmer" - I write primarily Node.js and Go these days but I also maintained some Python projects, I automate deployments, I manage projects and pretty much do everything in between. I aim to always find the best possible solutions to real problems and I create the tools to facilitate that.

I also write some cross-platform GUI apps, I created a binary delivery service for ffmpeg suite, I make some music every now and then, I try to play with Raspberry Pi but never have enough time. I follow the software news, with a bias towards Open Source, Free Software, networking and security.

Backstory

I started getting into web development around the year 2000.

Over time I've developed a taste for elegance, reliability, functionality and simplicity in code. The simpler the codebase the easier it is to maintain and guarantee its functionality. To a large extent I am a perfectionist who cares about making the right choices and doing the job correctly (and sometimes just prototyping things to unblock yourself or explore a concept). I write lots of code. I contribute to Open Source and I experiment a lot.

Through years of working on the client-side code I've learned a huge amount about HTML, CSS and JavaScript. I've used iframes in IE, I copy-pasted scripts in the early 2000s, I made Flash movies, I used MooTools, Prototype, jQuery, Bootstrap and Foundation.

I started moving to the server-side in mid-2000s. I've already picked up some fairly basic PHP a long time ago and I moved on to professionally develop applications around 2009. After evaluating various frameworks I started working with CodeIgniter. It was very well documented and had a great community. From 2013 my remaining PHP work revolved mostly around Laravel.

I moved primarily to Node.js around 2014 and have been using it ever since.



Skills and experience

  • HTML / XHTML
  • CSS
  • JavaScript
  • Node.js
  • Go
  • PHP
  • CodeIgniter, Laravel
  • Bootstrap, Foundation
  • Photoshop and the Adobe suite
  • LESS & SASS
  • MySQL, Active Record, ORM
  • MongoDB
  • Design patterns
  • Unit testing
  • Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)
  • Version Control (Git, SVN)
  • Agile, Scrum, Kanban workflow
  • Visualising data
  • End-to-end application design
  • Amazon Web Services
  • Design and development of User Interface and Experience & back-end
  • Coding for accessibility and responsiveness
  • RESTful APIs
  • Network infrastructure and architecture
  • Linux administration
  • PCI Compliance
  • Continous Integration
  • Web App Security

Some experience with

  • Web Components
  • Angular
  • React/Next
  • D3.js
  • Python
  • Perl
  • C++
  • Data indexing
  • Data extraction
  • Natural language processing (NLP)