About Me - Technical Achievements

The Story

As a child, I was always fascinated by computers. At the age of 20, I decided to pursue a career as a professional software developer. I began taking C++ courses and passed the Plovdiv University (PU) entrance exam with a score of 5.40. However, shortly after that, I moved to Sofia and started working at a company called Freido, where I initially worked with PHP.

Later, I joined StangaOne, where we actively used the Symfony Framework, along with Doctrine & Propel ORM, for backend development. Of course, we also worked with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. In addition, we integrated various payment methods and implemented numerous other features.

During my 18+ years of experience, I have worked for various companies both as a full-time employee and a part-time contractor. Throughout my career, I have developed my skills and gained a deeper understanding of the industry.

I have collaborated with various Bulgarian companies, such as:

• GIPS Bulgaria
• BMS - Bulgarian kitchen
• Agro Plovdiv
• Dairy Systems
• Aдвокат Росен Димитров
• and many others

As well as international ones, such as:

• StangaOne
• Diversity
• Infinigods
• and others

At StangaOne I have worked on various and complex applications in fields like banking system, e-commerce and etc. We integrated:

• different payment methods and API's
• unique and attractive UI's
• complex server-side & frontend logic

One of the most interesting projects I have worked on is Diversity.com — a job posting portal for minorities in the United States.

After presenting several ideas and developing the first version of the website, the client was highly impressed with my work and promoted me to the role of Technical Manager. They handled the sales aspect, while I was responsible for the technical side of the business, including website development and online marketing.

To support the project's growth, we needed to expand the team by hiring additional programmers, designers, and marketers. Once we assembled the team, the business took off significantly, generating a monthly profit of approximately $100,000.

A large part of this success was due to my marketing strategies! One of the biggest achievements was getting the website indexed as the #1 result on Google for the keyword "diversity" — a remarkable milestone, considering how extremely competitive the U.S. market is for top-ranking keywords on Google. This happened around 2017.

Responsibilities:

• Developing complex applications, integration of third party API's, payment methods
• Managing marketing strategy
• Managing team of 4 specialists
• Communication with stake holders, planning, goal achieving strategy
• High Level Sytem Design and schemas

Interesting case:

While we were developing this application, there were many additional projects and technical challenges that I had to solve.

One particular case study involved a database with several million records and daily traffic of 50,000 – 70,000 visits on the homepage. The challenge was to implement a slider that retrieves results from the database via AJAX and displays them on the homepage, all while ensuring a load time of under 1 second (based on SEO requirements).

Simply optimizing the database query was not enough—a non-standard solution was required!

I came up with an effective approach: I created a cron job that selects 250 job posts from millions of records. This cron job runs every six hours and stores these 250 job posts in a JSON file. The slider then randomly selects 60 records from this pre-generated JSON file, ensuring fast page load times.

I had another case where people from minorities in BG came to me and asked me to run ads for them on FB (as FB blocks them constantly) and I had to bypass FB protections. As well as many, many other projects and cases.

After Diversity.com, I started activly working with   NODEJS (ExpressJS),   REACT (Nextjs),    TYPESCRIPT and maintly JS technologies. My main tech stack at the moment.

Another interesting project I have worked on is a project involving web3. Games ... where you can play and earn NFTs and sell it. The project is Nextjs based (where i had to re-write it from php and react 16 into Nextjs 13) with typescript and nodejs. Also includes functions for working with web3 - metamask wallet, solidity and blockchain where I gained serious knowledge and skills. You can check out one of my samples showing on my personal website.

I have been working also for We Craft Media for short period of time. Developing software for managing clients and their electricity vehicles needs with main tech stack: React, ExpressJS, TypeScript.

I have worked also on a very complex full stack banking applications where integration of third party API's was required like Visa and Lexis Nexis for checking users if they are sanction or not. Tech stack was mainly NEXTJS.

At ZebrineX we did a prototype project with React, firebaseDB and ExpressJS We worked on a project for handling payments in multiple ways (cash, bank cards, vouchers, etc.) simultaneously for a large German corporation. The technologies we used were: Vue3, Fastify, PostgreSQL, and more.

One of my proudest achievements is to invoke a Go function inside a React component! That was achieved by using the gRPC. In this way I can transmit data from a backend to frontend the fastest way, or between microservices.