SEEKING WORK | Europe | Remote Worldwide

I am an engineering lead with 20+ years of experience in software engineering in startup, scaleup and enterprise. I bring both product and technical sides together in my experience, so I can help you flesh out ideas, systematically analyze them, prioritize, architect solution and bring it to life. Available for consulting or full time team involvement.

# Areas

• Product ideation, analysis and architecture

• Team and technical leadership

• Independent software development

• Technical and software development best practices coaching

• API design

• Technical writing and documentation

# Contribution examples

• Increase frequency of releases by standardizing the release process and educating people

• Technical architecture and development of new features, often in high risk, high uncertainty environments

• Improve data team effectiveness by introducing better support process and documentation

• Work with external vendor to drive implementations of new payments methods

• Build out skills of multiple developers via code and architecture reviews, delegating tasks that help the

# Technologies and tools

Web and APIs: Java+Spring, JavaScript, TypeScript, Node.js+Express.js/hapi, React, OpenAPI

Cloud: AWS - EC2, ECS, S3, ...

Data: Python, Airflow, Kafka, Flink, Aero, Redshift, MS SQL server, MySQL, MongoDB, Couchbase, SQL

# Contacts

Location: Slovakia, remote, relocation OK

LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/michalkostic

Web: https://michalkostic.com/

E-mail: [email protected]

I am bored of AI - it produces boring and mediocre results. Now, the science and engineering achievement is great - being able to produce even boring results on this level would be considered SCI-FI 10 years ago.

Maybe I am just bored of people posting these mediocre results over and over on social and landing pages as some kind of magic. Now, the most content people produce themselves is boring and mediocre anyway. The Gen AI just takes away even the last remaining bits of personality from their writing, adding a flair of laziness - look at this boring piece I was too lazy to write, so I asked AI to generate it

As the quote goes: "At some point we ask of the piano-playing dog not 'Are you a dog?' , but 'Are you any good at playing the piano?'" - I am eagerly waiting for the Gen AIs of today to cross the uncanny valley. Even with all this fatigue, I am positive on the AI can and will enable new use cases and could be the first major UX change from introduction of graphical user interfaces or a true pixie dust sprinkled on actually useful tools.

Your hands are the most practical brain-computer interface you have. With touch typing it really feels like you are controlling computer with your mind - for me it's absolutely worth the time investment.

I was lucky my father prompted me to self-learnt it in high school. I have started with learning basic hand positions and technique from a book. Once I could barely type without looking, I started transcribing handwritten drafts of my school essays to the computer. Painfully slow for first few days but gradually I got to decent speed (and tidy looking essays).

Oddly, when writing documents, I still prefer pen and paper for taking notes and writing first draft. Afterwards nothing beats the power of editing on computer where touch typing is the ultimate power up.

Beautifully put. I didn't give it serious thought until perhaps 5 years ago, at which point I started gearing my tools to keyboard only input. I had always found the mouse clumsy, inconcise and a distraction if it was needed.

Without getting caught up on specific tools, using editors and a window manager that are all keyboard focused, and learning all the keyboard shortcuts I can for my tools,I feel I can stay in flow much better and work more concisely.

Using some of these tools makes me feel like I am using telepathy almost, as stuff happens on the screen where and when I want precisely.

Add the persistent anxiety that you are missing something you should not have and you end up with constantly refreshing the feed instead of working - just like social media and exact opposite of what you want.

MS Teams cause enough headache by sorting the messages by "latest updated thread" completely obliterating the mental model of the conversations in the channel I have.

Some ideas for ideal team chat:

* Automatically build threads or tag messages by topic in threads so you can easily filter out the topics interesting to you - often there are multiple discussions intertwined that should have been in separate threads but people just reuse the threads

* Collapse the resolved discussions into a conclusion (with option to view the discussion) - when the discussion goes into shootout of messages you might be interested only in the conclusion, not how they got there

* Announcements - sometimes you really just want to announce something (on company wide scale, team scale, or just personal Tweet sort of thing) - make these separate and browsable - here the automatic feed construction sounds appropriate

* Activity digest - at last workplace I liked the Confluence digest email as it brought attention to projects and topics I was not directly involved with - nothing happened if I missed those, but was nice to keep an eye on some of the initiatives

It is super important to make a tool the people can trust - no one likes to make or hear excuses like "sorry I did not see the message".

We definitely need better tools for communication, so keeping fingers crossed for your success.

There's so much more to CSV file import than just uploading and parsing - service like this can become backbone of any enterprise data exchange pipeline. For real mission critical use cases you need features like being able to ingest multiple gigabyte sized files reliably, quickly revert the import or switch to a specific version, detecting errors and recovering from partially corrupted files, detecting the new version is available, possibly importing just changes, publishing metrics on imported files to observability platforms, alerting if anything goes wrong...

If CSV import is not enough of a product (I believe it is) you can add exporting functionality (e.g. export this table to CSV and deliver to SFTP exactly once, but make sure to handle target downtimes) and you have an "Enterprise File Gateway" that could reduce development costs in many companies.

This site is quintessential Czech humor, similar in spirit to recent Kralovec annexation and Jara Cimrman. Thank you for linking it here.

https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Literature/WarWithThe... is another example of Czech humor. (From the author who brought you Robots.)

Great video. It shows how much climbing (and lot of other things) is in your head and your repeated experience. The route (5.9/5a/VI) must be laughably easy for Midtbø who climbs 5.15/9a/XI+ yet he is quite understandably fighting for life while Honnold is walking around, enjoying no-hand rests and recording. Gradual exposure takes some of the scariness away I guess.

Maybe the SkySail could own the sail system and sell the "thrust" - basically charging a success fee for saved fuel. In a similar vein in how the airlines don't own the engines of their airplanes but rent them from manufacturer - https://aviation.stackexchange.com/questions/12528/jet-engin...

Of course this is an armchair thought experiment, but I am curious about your opinions.

It will be difficult and frustrating, but can be also fun and rewarding in addition. Here are some pracoval tips that worked for me in similar situations.

Treat everyone with respect - everyone has a story and being competent developer is not the only metric for human beings.

Reduce scope - better deliver few solid features than many half baked. You will need to get heavily involved in implementing those features so better not spread yourself too thin.

Start with authoritative management style - it's ok to say "do this and do it like this". Particularity with hierarchy based cultures, this could be even expected. At the beginning it can be uncomfortable as Western developers are often used to servant leadership style that supports freedom, outlet for developer creativity and individual autonomy.

Set precise rules - people are usually able to follow checklists and step by step guides. Have process ready and thought through, but tailor it to the situation on the ground. An example could be: implement task, write unit test with 80% coverage, build and run test locally with no tests failing, send for review.

Don't expect creativity - be as precise as possible specifying the tasks. Include design in the description, any names of the classes you want to have. Ideally have a pointer to code or example on internet that can be copy paste and modified. Specifying tasks this way is doubles the work it usually takes but otherwise you get into endless reworks and headaches. The level of detail needs you to be very well prepared in the technology, design and domain knowledge. Read up ahead on the stack they are using, patterns used for the type of app you are building, look at the code and get familiar with the domain.

Use the hierarchy - identify the one or two promising team members and with with them. Let all other team members consult them first and only then approach you. It's easier to work in depth with two people than get drowned in random questions from five or six.

Expect to get your hands dirty - you will still need to do lot of individual contributor low level implementation work to set standards and so that others have place to copy from. Your code needs to be near perfect the first time as it will get copied over many times. This is painful, but make it work now and refactor later often doesn't with great, when there are 5 people multiplying the work that needs to be refactored.

Distinguish the work from the person - it keeps amazing me how much I like some people on personal level yet hate their work output.

On the other hand this can be a great adventure, getting to know new people and country while working on a common goal. Crisis often bonds people together anyway.

Hope that helps and keeping fingers crossed for you.

Feynman: Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman! - great inspiration for regaining playfulness. Particularly this quote applicable to many burnt out developers I believe:

Physics disgusts me a little bit now, but I used to enjoy doing physics. Why did I enjoy it? I used to play with it. ... So I got this new attitude. Now that I am burned out and I'll never accomplish anything,...I'm going to play with physics whenever I want to, without worrying about any importance whatsoever.