Cloud Solution Architect and Lead Developer in Zagreb, Croatia

As a community conference co-organizer, I had multiple roles throughout the years. Serving as a core team member during conference planning and preparation, my most contributing role was volunteer acquisition and coordination. I also served as a talk committee member selecting the conference content and helped with conference workshops and general conference activities. It had been a tremendous experience organizing an event for over 900 people and making a positive change in the IT community in Zagreb, Croatia.

I co-founded a JavaScript Zagreb Meetup back in 2013, growing it from zero to over 550 members in three years before passing it on to younger generations. Regular monthly event organization included finding speakers with interesting topics, promoting the events, and finding occasional sponsors for the after-meetup socializing portion. Occasionally, I did some talks on JavaScript-related topics myself.

My role in Muzika.hr was more than just technical. Besides the usual 'all things IT, a common single-person role for the early 2000s, I worked closely with the editor-in-chief on the strategy and content, assisted as an author, and started the concert photography section, gathering and coordinating a group of about a dozen collaborating photographers. As a result of almost ten years of that activity and an associated online photo gallery, I coordinated the organization of a physical exhibition of concert photographs for the 10th anniversary of the media, initially hosted in one of the most famous Zagreb art galleries. Later on, it traveled to several other cities around Croatia.

I wrote this article describing a horizontally scalable solution for a customer's image upload processing. This type of serverless solution can reduce the strain on API servers and eliminate the need for running separate servers to handle spikes without crashing. A serverless computing model with AWS Lambda is a natural fit for utility classes of tasks, such as preparing and sending transactional emails and push notifications.

This client needed verification of an experimental client-side JavaScript framework to develop their web and mobile solution. After a short R&D stint, that framework turned out to be a highly risky choice due to a series of unfulfilled promises by the vendor, so I advised against using it. The client settled on one of the proven client-side frameworks instead, in conjunction with Apache Cordova for mobile deployment. I laid out the application architecture, built initial functionalities, and configured the deployment pipelines before handing it over to their in-house hire.

I joined this client to support their MVP release efforts by shaping up the required set of features while improving their existing codebase. I organized a process of CoffeeScript to JavaScript migration without affecting the on-going development at the time when CoffeeScript was becoming obsolete and needed to be phased-out. Additionally, I advised on the advantages of switching from Marionette.js to AngularJS as a good choice for their use-case, a step the company took later on.

Four weeks before the official MVP launch date, the client's development efforts were behind schedule, with unclear features and functionality boundaries. They hired me for last-minute help to determine what was feasible and what wasn't less than a month before the public launch. My role was to focus the client on doable areas, build the necessary functionalities required for the launch, trim the excess or unclearly defined features, and make sure the release target was hit. The final result of this intense, short-term effort was an improved existing codebase, some functionalities were better scoped, bugs squashed, UI polished, and the implemented features worked correctly for a successful MVP launch.