Andrej Bencic

Go has become my go to languange for general purpose software engineering. It is a right mix of a systems language, development speed, program correctness and a prototyping tool. I use Go as the primary language for Tenderly, a blockchain monitoring platform, where the entire transaction processing pipeline is built with it. I like that Go walks a line between development speed and language safety and performance. Being a simple language with just the essential concepts for a modern programming language and its flexible type system gives you almost interpreting languange development speed, while keeping your programs safe and correct with type checks. Another thing that goes to Go's benefit is the fact that more and more open source tools get written in Go every day. It is becoming a de facto language for cloud open source, making it a great investment.

I have been interested in Distributed Systems for more than I can remember. My first exposure to distributed systems was with ManageWP, a platform that at the time of my employment, managed more than a million WordPress installations, providing backup technology, site management and site analytics for all of them. That had to scale somehow, so a combination of scalable NoSQL databases, message queues and a fair bit of synchronization was used. Currently, I am dealing with problems of creating an Ethereum monitoring platform that has to scale beyond processing a single network, where writing an efficient pipeline that will not crash under the processing weight is a must. Finally, I am a strong advocate of another aspect of distributed systems and that is the monitoring and infrastructure management that must be kept to a high standard in order for any distributes system to function properly and correctly.

I have been using PHP for most of my career as a tool for quickly building out prototypes and early versions of products. I have experience writing backend services in Laravel as I've used it on several earlier projects to prototype customer platforms. I also have extensive experience of writing robust and scalable Symfony applications, which I used while working on ManageWP, a WordPress management platform that was acquired by GoDaddy for its backup technology and WordPress automation and management tooling. I think PHP is a great language that can vary the level of strictness it requires and accommodate almost any timeline for a project. This is very good for long projects since they can start out and prototype core value proposition very quickly, and afterward, the language and tooling can incrementally be dialed up to accommodate higher performance and stability needs.

I have started using React as I moved towards full stack area of software development. React was my pick for the frontend technology because I was immediately drawn to the way React thinks about frontend code. Before React, I have worked on various projects that used some sort of templating language driven by the backend technology as well as trying out earlier versions of Angular. Because of that, I fully appreciated React's simplicity and power in breaking the status quo in putting Javascript first and HTML and CSS second. As Javascript has become an integral part of almost every application, it only made sense to put the focus on it and use HTML as the workhorse at Javascript's disposal, instead of the other way around. So far, I have worked on multiple React projects, every time from a full stack developer perspective, so writing backend code that is focused on the user experience as well as being mindful of the performance impact unnecessary API calls can make, come as a natural instinct.