Alen Pokos, Developer in Zagreb, Croatia
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Alen Pokos

Verified Expert  in Engineering

Mentorship & Coaching Developer

Zagreb, Croatia

Toptal member since October 13, 2021

Expertise
PHPSymfonyFront-endCode ReviewMySQLLinuxJavaScriptDevOpsTest AutomationDockerVarnishOpen Source Development
Bio

Alen is a problem solver and engineer who enjoys educating other engineers and giving talks. He's passionate about learning new things and discovering how everything works. Experienced in high-traffic, high-performance systems and leading multidisciplinary technical teams. Proficient in many back-end technologies and job positions.

Portfolio

Trikoder
APIs, Git, PHP, Symfony, Refactoring, DevOps, Docker, Caching, Elasticsearch...
Trikoder
DevOps, Mentorship & Coaching, Technical Design, GitLab CI/CD, Web API...
Inland Navigation Development Centre
Java, Symfony, DevOps, Backbone.js, CSS, High-availability Clusters, GIS...

Experience

  • PHP - 14 years
  • Web API - 10 years
  • DevOps - 8 years
  • Symfony - 7 years
  • Mentorship & Coaching - 7 years
  • Team Leadership - 6 years
  • GitLab CI/CD - 5 years
  • Varnish - 4 years

Availability

Part-time

Preferred Environment

PhpStorm, Git, GitLab, GitLab CI/CD, PHP, Symfony

The most amazing...

...thing I've achieved as an arhitect and technical lead is completing a state-of-the-art content portal that ranked in the top three in the country.

Work Experience

Senior Back-end Developer

2014 - PRESENT
Trikoder
  • Served as the lead developer and architect for a high-traffic state-of-the-art news portal, featuring tailor-made content management and advanced and fast caching that enabled the system to handle large traffic with low infrastructure costs.
  • Acted as the lead developer for transforming and refactoring a successful leaflet system to support expansion to multiple country markets.
  • Served as a mentor and led to more than 20 developers, onboarding them onto work tasks, developing them from junior roles onward, and growing them as engineers.
  • Developed and contributed to various company's open-source projects such as jsonapibundle and oauth2-bundle.
Technologies: APIs, Git, PHP, Symfony, Refactoring, DevOps, Docker, Caching, Elasticsearch, GitLab, GitLab CI/CD, High-availability Clusters, Mentorship & Coaching, Varnish, Web API, Technical Design, Postman, MySQL, Docker Compose

Deputy CTO

2018 - 2021
Trikoder
  • Built the DevOps department to improve development tools and practices with the goal of automation and building DevOps culture.
  • Evaluated current practices and identified and planned new technologies.
  • Oversaw and supported the development of a project of 50 engineers.
Technologies: DevOps, Mentorship & Coaching, Technical Design, GitLab CI/CD, Web API, Technical Leadership, Web Architecture, Refactoring, Solution Design, Web Security, Test Automation

Software Developer

2012 - 2014
Inland Navigation Development Centre
  • Developed web visualization for river vessels with complete information and navigation tools, custom map layers, and data generated from GIS.
  • Maintained infrastructure (both hardware and software) for tracking and information exchange for river vessels, including embedded software for industrial computers, high availability clusters, and large data databases.
  • Helped develop multilingual information portals for international partners and users of EU-funded projects.
  • Acted as a member of international expert groups and a national representative regarding GIS, vessel tracking and tracing, electronic notification systems, and international data exchange.
Technologies: Java, Symfony, DevOps, Backbone.js, CSS, High-availability Clusters, GIS, PostgreSQL, Front-end

Senior Back-end Developer

2008 - 2012
Dimedia Internet Technologies
  • Developed a custom in-house used MVC framework for rapid application development that was later used on several projects, including a large-scale SaaS product.
  • Customized open-source project management tools used by the company to track and plan projects.
  • Worked on integrations on real estate traffic information into the business system for a high traffic site.
Technologies: PHP, MySQL, JavaScript

Experience

Njuskalo.hr

http://www.njuskalo.hr
One of the top classified platforms in Croatia and Slovenia. Worked on planning expansion to new markets from a technical perspective. I was actively involved in the development of key and core aspects regarding security, performances and APIs as well as working with other developers on the project on defining coding standards and code architecture.

Tportal

http://www.tportal.hr
One of the top Croatian news portals. I've been in charge of the architecture of the project as well as implementation by both, leading a team of developers and being a core member of the development and DevOps of the project. Worked on implementation of state-of-the-art caching with Varnish.

Jsonapi Bundle

https://github.com/trikoder/jsonapibundle
A Symfony bundle that enables the fast and customizable building of RESTful jsonapi compliant web APIs. I am the author and started the development of this bundle and followed through to the open-sourcing of the project.

Skills

Libraries/APIs

Web API, Backbone.js, JSONAPI::Resources

Tools

Varnish, PhpStorm, Git, GitLab, GitLab CI/CD, GIS, Postman, Docker Compose

Languages

PHP, JavaScript, Java, CSS

Frameworks

Symfony

Paradigms

DevOps, Web Architecture, Test Automation, Refactoring, Load Testing

Platforms

Linux, Docker

Storage

MySQL, PostgreSQL, Elasticsearch, NoSQL

Other

APIs, Team Leadership, Front-end, Solution Design, Mentorship & Coaching, Code Review, High-availability Clusters, Technical Design, Technical Leadership, Website Performance, Redis Clusters, Load Balancers, Caching, Open Source, Web Security, Interviewing

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