IT skills
- APIs: The facade of your system, hiding its internal complexity. Everyone wants this facade to be nice for others, and I’m helping people with that
- Testing: I have a weighted approach of testing: there’s no need in overtest everything (at the beginning for sure), but the critical parts should be tested
- Refactoring: This is huge topic, and only following best practices and carefulness lead to success. Sometimes this process takes a lot of time, even if you have detailed plan
- Data parsing/normalizing: Probably my favourite types of tasks. I love data manipulation
- Data scraping: Watching run logs of hundreds of simultaneous scraping connections really please my eyes
- Tasks automation: As a programmer, you always have a mind/hands work to do. Automate repetitive tasks, but only after they become really annoying. Don’t automate too early
- Networking: Every developer should have experience with building own “ Anton ”. Since the 2007, when I had two, and till now, when I have eight bare-metal servers in my house, I love to practice networking stuff
- Clouds: As a freelancer I use clouds from the early AWS days, and my experience grow with each new client. There are huge amount of tools clouds provide, and I have been working with most popular of them. Sometimes building crazy things
Soft skills
- Self-organization/time management: Having been a freelancer all my life, mastering planning and time-management is a must
- Analytical abilities: Learn yours and others mistakes, track success, make future decisions based on both
- KISS: Don't overcomplicate/overengineer, split complex tasks on subtasks, manage one at the time
- Creativity: When you experienced with your tools, you can do amazing things with them
- Perseverance: There's always a way to do the thing, but if stuck, try to find another solution with team
- Problem Solving: Formulate the problem, that is 80% of solution. Consult with pros, use other's expertise and become better professional
- Eager to learn/Curiosity: The more you know, the more ways you can do the task. Always learn something, even unrelated to your main specialization. It's worth it
My dream team
- have the №1 rule in your code is low in coupling and high in cohesion
- code review is the only way code become merged to main
- love to write tests and that is easy to do, because of rule №1
- don’t spend thousands of hours per year on endless daily voice meetings
- have clear requirements and just work, using daily text reports to sync
- prefers self-documenting text communication over voice
- located in US/Europe/Australia/East and Southeast Asia region
- prefer hypermedia-driven approaches like Datastar or HTMX for building snappy UIs without the complexity of heavy SPA frameworks
- understand the importance of a clean API boundary and keeping business logic decoupled from the delivery mechanism
- value end-to-end responsibility, from writing infrastructure as code (Terraform, Ansible) to optimizing database queries and styling with Tailwind CSS
- prefer simple architectures and standard libraries over pulling in heavy dependencies for trivial tasks
Related interests
- Microcontrollers: We live at the times when buying NY/Christmas garland is boring, if you have ESP32 (which has WiFi module), few 10x10 plates of ws2812B, and love to solder
- GTD: Learning how to manage your own life, how brain works, how it tends to cheat you, etc is a key of success for freelancer
Job log
Please note, these are major jobs I'm proud of. As a seasoned freelancer, I did lots of short-term projects (see my Upwork profile)
Location
Please keep in mind that over the past 12 years, 95% of my clients have been based in North America, so my work schedule is already adjusted to ensure significant overlap with that region. The same applies to Southeast Asia region.
- I can relocate easily — I just need to notify my landlord.
- Preferred regions to live and work: Southeast Asia (especially Malaysia), Georgia (I have a residence permit there), Türkiye.
- From November to May, it gets chilly in Georgia (country), so I usually work and travel during this period.
- This winter, I plan to go to Southeast Asia.
- Until 2022, I lived in Russia, but I will not return there anymore.
- My current time zone: UTC+4
Desired salary
- My rate is 40$/hour. That's 40h*160h*12m = 76800$ per year (net).
- I'm totally OK with a 1/2 rate for the first onboarding month