Andrei Olar
Verified Expert in Engineering
Technical Leadership Developer
Cluj-Napoca, Romania
Toptal member since January 15, 2019
Andrei is an inquisitive person, an avid learner, and a team player. Drawn primarily toward craftsmanship and architecture, he's worked with many technologies and teams of all sizes over the past two decades. He's a polyglot programmer, a clean coder, and an agile tech lead that puts trust and mutual respect above all else.
Portfolio
Experience
- Technical Leadership - 15 years
- C# - 13 years
- Agile Software Development - 6 years
- REST APIs - 5 years
- Python 3 - 4 years
- Node.js - 3 years
- Kubernetes - 2 years
- Go - 1 year
Work Experience
Principal Engineer
Zenitech
- Mentored developers within the organization interested in individual contributor roles.
- Contributed to the development of the company's technology strategy.
- Evaluated growth opportunities and identified the potential technology fit.
Software Architect
ComplyAdvantage
- Led the technical development of the ComplyAdvantage screening application.
- Promoted DevOps culture within the organization through practices such as JIT delivery or IaC.
- Oversaw the company's key result implementation and mediated conversations with key stakeholders within and outside the company.
- Implemented automated architectural governance principles to ensure a higher delivery standard and effortless standardization.
Software Developer | Agile Coach
NetMatch
- Created and maintained websites as a full-stack developer using the Microsoft .NET stack and a proprietary front-end platform based on CanJS.
- Ported projects from older technologies such as ASP.NET Web Forms to newer ones such as ASP.NET Core and Vue.js.
- Integrated websites with the Stripe API to facilitate payments.
- Optimized team and project workflows by promoting and implementing best practices such as continuous integration, code reviews, test-driven development, and Kanban or team retrospectives.
- Drove Git adoption over TF version control and tutored colleagues that were new to decentralized version control systems.
- Improved deployment automation using Nexus, Puppet, Powershell, Octopus Deploy, Visual Studio Team Services/TFS, or TeamCity.
- Mentored colleagues who sought to write higher-quality code based on sound architectural principles.
- Mentored student interns during summer internships.
Mobile Application Software Architect
Intel Corporation
- Developed a Windows eBook reader with WPF while working part-time on the same product on other platforms (Android and iOS) using Xamarin.
- Organized CI/CD pipelines for desktop and mobile applications using Atlassian tooling.
- Improved best practices like code reviews or pair programming.
- Designed and implemented single sign-on experiences for desktop and mobile applications using providers from the education sector such as Clever.
- Implemented a decentralized content distribution network proof of concept using Node.js.
Software Developer and Foreman
Ullink
- Developed extensions for the company's financial trading platform.
- Wrote profit and loss projection algorithms for optimizing financial outcomes of trading operations.
- Implemented data monitoring of UI components for high traffic data sources.
- Regulated quality standards for the company's codebase.
- Organized workshops focusing on the continuous improvement of legacy code.
Software Developer | Technical Lead
iQuest Group
- Designed and implemented an environment for engineering medical tests.
- Coached team members on Agile methodologies in general and eXtreme Programming (XP) specifically.
- Introduced continuous integration, test-driven development, automated UI testing, and implemented code reviews as core practices on the project.
- Created a component toolkit for dynamically creating UIs with an emphasis on memory optimization and code reuse.
- Created a test framework using NUnit and C#, which allowed reliably testing UI components produced via XAML compilation at a time when such frameworks were in their infancy and still unreliable.
Software Developer
Transart
- Implemented a provider for ADO.NET, which allowed the execution of SQL 92 queries originating on .NET Compact compatible mobile devices on any SQL server, such as MySQL, MS SQL Server, PostgreSQL.
- Created a tool for testing websites similar to Selenium using Delphi 7, COM+, and ActiveX.
- Developed a warehouse management system for the fashion industry. The technologies used were ASP, VBScript, SQL, .NET Compact, and the .NET Framework.
- Created a data exchange middleware platform for data representable as text. It had an exchange server, an administration application, and tools for securing communication with third-party systems via secure Shell tunnels.
- Built a component library for Windows Forms applications which allowed creating dynamic user interfaces based on data inference and templates.
- Developed sets of reusable components for writing mobile apps on top of Windows CE, PocketPC, or Windows Mobile using the .NET Compact framework.
Software Developer
Self-employed
- Implemented custom software based on requirements in the accounting and bookkeeping sector.
- Created a word processor with rich text capabilities.
- Designed, implemented, and maintained a scoring application for the game of bridge.
- Developed a type of chat software to be used in an intranet.
- Implemented a cruise control module able to control both the acceleration and the speed of a car.
Project History
Intel Education Study App
The original premise was to take hard-copied books, convert them to a digital format, and then enhance the lecture by adding various tools for studying.
FEATURES:
• Embedded videos, images, thesaurus, and dictionary lookup
• Flashcards
• A journal that would allow the viewing and printing of a summary of the material
• An ability to share notes, journal entries, and other user-generated content with others
• Digital rights management for the content publishers
• A single sign-on that uses external providers such as Clever (Clever.com) to allow easier integration into a school/classroom environment
Zoover.nl
https://www.zoover.nlWarehouse Management System
FEATURES:
• Monitors incoming and outgoing merchandise
• Manages various packaging options for the merchandise
• Anti-theft protocols in place
• Implements contingency measures in case of damage or various other problems with the goods
• Offers near real-time reports on stock or projected space availability
• Provides readily available topographical information of the warehouse
• Offers role-based access to its functionality
While most warehouse management systems of the time were exclusively desktop-based, this system innovated by offering a mobile application. This drastically improved all activities related to keeping stock properly. The mobile application was in part native and web-based, reflecting what would become one of the main industry trends.
Another innovative aspect was integrating the warehouse's own automation features into the application.
Code Retreat Organizer and Facilitator
https://www.coderetreat.orgDevelopment Environment for Medical Tests
FEATURES:
• A pluggable architecture that enables engineering on any medical test for any device
• Dynamic UI generation based on user input and data inference
• A core repository for storing data in a versioned, consistent way
• An advanced knowledge repository for browsing and search algorithms
• Workflows for releasing new tests to production devices worldwide
• Automatic documentation generation
• Semantic differentiation between versions of the same test
Profit and Loss Extension for High-touch Trading
The project was an extension built on top of an existing platform.
FEATURES:
• Monitor profit and loss statistics in near real time on transactions from multiple sources (various markets, registered in an order management system, and so on)
• The ability to act quickly to ensure the best course of action is taken at a given moment
• Keep an updated log of the status of transactions as reflected by multiple data sources
Education
Bachelor of Law (BLL) Degree in International Contract Law
Universitatea Babes-Bolyai - Cluj-Napoca, Romania
Bachelor in Computer Science (BSc) Degree in Computer Science
Universitatea Babes-Bolyai - Cluj-Napoca, Romania
Certifications
AWS Certified Solutions Architect
Amazon Web Services (AWS)
Agile Certified Practioner
PMI | Project Management Institute
Financial Markets
Coursera
Certified Scrum Master
Scrum Alliance
TS: Windows Applications Development with Microsoft .NET Framework 4
Microsoft
Skills
Libraries/APIs
REST APIs, Node.js, React, Reactive Extensions, React Router, Windows Forms (WinForms), Flask-RESTful, Vue, Vuex, TFS API, Google APIs, Facebook Login, Stripe API, Jira REST API, SQLite.NET, RequireJS, SQLAlchemy, PySpark
Tools
Vim Text Editor, Microsoft Visual Studio, WebStorm, JetBrains Rider, Git, IntelliJ IDEA, Visual Studio, Crucible, RabbitMQ, TFS, Subversion (SVN), Mercurial, Atlassian, Jira, Confluence, Bamboo, TeamCity, Jenkins, GitLab CI/CD, NGINX, SuperTest, xUnit.net, Webpack, Webpack 4, Webpack 3, PyCharm, Helm, GitLab
Languages
C#, XAML, JavaScript, SQL, Python 3, Transact-SQL (T-SQL), Python, Java SE (Core Java), Delphi, Active Server Pages (ASP), C++, CSS, Kotlin, XML, Delphi 7, Bash, Java, VBScript, Go, Visual Basic
Frameworks
Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF), ASP.NET Core 2, .NET, ADO.NET, Entity, Rx, Flask, ASP.NET Core, ASP.NET Web API, ASP.NET MVC, ASP.NET, Django, Redux, Django REST Framework, Apache Felix (OSGI), Express.js, Windows PowerShell, ASP.NET Web Forms, .NET Compact, NUnit, SpecFlow, ActiveX, Spark, .NET 2, .NET 4, OSGi
Paradigms
Extreme Programming, Model View ViewModel (MVVM), Test-driven Development (TDD), Design Patterns, Inversion of Control (IoC), Object-oriented Design (OOD), Object-oriented Programming (OOP), Kanban, Scrum, Continuous Integration (CI), Continuous Delivery (CD), Agile Software Development, REST, Gang of Four (GOF) Design Patterns, Aspect-oriented Programming, Concurrent Programming, Refactoring, Reactive Programming, Functional Programming, Agile Project Management, E2E Testing, Unit Testing, Behavior-driven Development (BDD), COM+, GRASP, Parallel Programming, Agile, Hosting
Platforms
Universal Windows Platform (UWP), Visual Studio Code (VS Code), Docker, Kubernetes, Windows Phone, Windows CE, Mobile, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Android, Xamarin, Java SE 6, Linux, Slackware, Apache2, OS X, Apache Kafka, Apache Flink, MacOS, iOS
Storage
MySQL, Microsoft SQL Server, Redis, MongoDB, PostgreSQL, XML-RPC, Elasticsearch, SQL Server 2016, SQL Server 2012
Other
SOLID Principles, System Architecture, Software Design, Software Architecture, Technical Leadership, PMI Agile Certified Practitioner (PMI-ACP), APIs, Component Libraries, Argo CD, Jira Administrator, Scrum Master, Windows Communication Foundation (WCF), Xamarin.Forms, SSH, TFS Administration, TFS Customization, A/B Testing, Project Lombok, DCOM, Dynamic Data Exchange (DDE), JetBrains IDE, Agile Delivery, Code Review, Facilitation, Coaching, AWS Certified Solution Architect
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