Russ Balabanov

Email ยท [email protected]

Some important dates / notes in my coding career

July 2008 first production experience with PHP and Web domain in general

March 2010 first experience with CodeIgniter framework

September 2011 Team Leader for the first time

October 2012 My first experience with Symfony v2 framework. Since that moment I've been working with this great framework until today

October 2014 Building very first REST API server.
Why I think it's important to mention? Mainly because ReactJS / VueJS wasn't popular, there was no ES6 yet at that moment and monolyths were dominant on the market. So try to imagine how clunky the system looked when there are two servers both with PHP and Symfony (Frontend was with Forms component and overriden Doctrine Repositories) communicating with each other via HTTP requests!

February 2016 first VueJS experience by working as a fullstack developer

March 2021 first production experience with Node and ExpressJS

May 2022 after 14 years of experience in PHP it's probably time to move for another long term challenge. Currently I'm trying to do less PHP and focus on Go Lang, Microservice architecture and K8S



Experience

Lead Developer @FANPLOYER.COM

TMM TECHNOLOGY
PHP 8 NodeJS Go 1.8 Symfony 6 MariaDB Puppeteer Docker Compose AWS S3 Dokku Bitbucket Pipelines RabbitMQ RestAPI Microservice architecture Bootstrap 5

- Made node.js microserivce with Puppeteer under the hood to crawl through websites, make screenshots and extract data. The data transfereed via RabbitMQ, the screenshots are stored via AWS S3

- Made PHP Symfony admin panel to administrate content

- Made Go RestAPI server for sharing data with third party applications

- Listener service on Go to process RabbitMQ channels and queues

December 2021 - Now

BACKEND DEVELOPER @WOOSEARCHANDFILTER

TMM TECHNOLOGY
PHP 8 Symfony 6 MySQL Highload WooCommerce API Symfony Messenger Docker Compose Bitbucket Pipelines RestAPI

- Made RestAPI server to interact with Wordpress plugin

- MySQL query optimization

- Module to sync with WooCommerce and keeping DB up-to-date

- Message Queue Architecture for syncing

July 2021 - April 2022

LEAD DEVELOPER @SPEAKRS

TMM TECHNOLOGY
PHP 8 Symfony 5 MariaDB API Platform Vimeo API GitLab CI/CD AWS S3 AWS IAM Cloudflare Dokku RestAPI Wordpress

Coding: Making a backend with API server on Symfony 5, Vimeo integration

DevOpsing: Amazon Route53, Amazon IAM, Cloudflare, GitLab CI/CD, Dokku, Amazon S3, rsync

May 2021 - November 2021

LEAD DEVELOPER @FITFORME.COM

TMM TECHNOLOGY
NodeJS ExpressJS Typescript PostgreSQL

I took this project alredy in MVP stage built with Node.js, TypeScript and Express framework. Continued developing the project by adding new features

March 2021 - May 2021

LEAD DEVELOPER @FITFORME.COM

TMM TECHNOLOGY
PHP 7 Symfony 5 MariaDB API Platform Docker Compose AWS IAM AWS Route53 Cloudflare Dokku Bitbucket Pipelines RestAPI Wordpress

Coding: Making a midlayer backend on Symfony 5 + API Platform

DevOpsing: The project contains multiple frontends on Wordpress (each per country). Used technologies: Amazon Route53, Amazon IAM, Cloudflare, Bitbucket pipelines, Dokku, Amazon S3, rsync

Other things: Designing code and database structure, working with third party service integrations

December 2019 - November 2021

LEAD DEVELOPER @DECIDEE.NL

TMM TECHNOLOGY
PHP 7 Symfony 4 MariaDB Codeception Docker Compose RestAPI

Rest API backend on Symfony based on my own library Tiny-rest

February 2019 - December 2019

SENIOR SYMFONY DEVELOPER @REGIE.IO

REGIE.IO
PHP 7 Symfony 4 MySQL VueJS Codeception Docker Compose Amazon Web Services jQuery Serverless

I was hired as a Symfony developer on a project built on Vanilla PHP without no indication whatsoever it should be on Symfony
My goal was to migrate existing live project with many legacy dependencies on Symfony 4 framework. Had to improve a lot of code base and database structure, refactoring jQuery snippets into Vue.js pages

November 2018 - December 2019

Lead Developer @DOBBI.COM

TMM TECHNOLOGY
PHP 7 Symfony 3 PostgreSQL VueJS Codeception Docker Compose RestAPI

REST API midlayer for loundry startup

- Leading the project

- Writing tests for testing REST API endpoints

- Configuring Docker compose for local environment

June 2018 - February 2019

Senior Developer

SAMPLES.COM
PHP 7 Symfony 4 MySQL ElasticSearch Logstash VueJS Docker Compose AWS S3 Bootstrap 4 jQuery

Creating a high load transactional email product system on Symfony 4 with ElasticSearch

February 2017 - February 2018

SENIOR DEVELOPER @TANKENWIN.NL

BERKMAN
PHP 7 Symfony 3 MySQL Vagrant AWS S3 Supervisor Gearman Bootstrap 4 jQuery

Building dashboard for Berkman tank stations with statistics and graphs. Aggregating data from tank stations in the Netherlads. Building lottery system for clients

April 2016 - April 2019

SENIOR DEVELOPER @HOUSEOFEINSTEIN.NL

HOUSE OF EINSTEIN
PHP 5 PHP 7 Symfony 3 MariaDB VueJS PHP Unit Redis Vagrant AWS S3 RestAPI Bootstrap 4 jQuery CSS

Discover specially selected clothing, delivered to your home tomorrow.

May 2014 - June 2018

Senior PHP Developer

CONTENTANALYTICS
PHP 5 CodeIgniter Symfony 3 PostgreSQL Big Data Vagrant AWS SQS Bootstrap 3 Bootstrap 4 jQuery CSS

Audit your content for recipient requirements quickly and understand the gaps in your product content that need to be updated.

Building features on CodeIgniter, making high load queries for PostgreSQL

February 2014 - February 2017

Symfony Developer @SHAREPAY.COM

OPTIMUM WEB
PHP 5 Symfony 2 PHP Unit iDeal Payments Bootstrap 3 jQuery HTML CSS

Developing subscription billing software on Symfony, Doctrine and Twig

September 2013 - April 2015

PHP Symfony Developer

THINKSOFTWARE
PHP 5 Symfony 2 MySQL jQuery HTML CSS

Building self estate portal for Iceland market.

October 2012 - May 2013

Team Lead | PHP Developer @PKWTEILE.DE

SMASHINGTEAM
PHP 5 Fuel PHP MySQL MongoDB HTML jQuery Highload C#

Maintainig the existing code base built on vanilla PHP. Building new key features. Making multi domain support and multi template support. Improving heavy queries on MySQL. Writing a tool for parsing 1M products items via HTTP. Writing with the team new version of software on FuelPHP framework

September 2011 - September 2012

PHP Developer

SMASHINGTEAM
PHP 5 CodeIgniter jQuery

Building master shop on CodeIgniter to distribute production. Building mini shops with installer on CodeIgniter which will connect to the master server and gather all products data and populate the mini shop

March 2010 - September 2011

Junior Frontend Developer

CHOICEELDERCARE.ORG | BERGENREMODELING.COM
jQuery HTML 4.1 CSS v2

Slicing PSD documents and exporting media. Converting PDF mockup into HTML page.

September 2009 - March 2010

Web Developer Intern

NQLX.COM
PHP 5 Drupal 6 jQuery HTML 4.1 CSS v2

Building small sattelite websites on Drupal framework. Converting PSD mockup into HTML page. Crossbrowser compatibility

September 2008 - September 2009

Education

Technical University of Moldova

Bachelor of Science
Information Technologies - Software development
August 2007 - July 2012

Skills

Programming Languages & Tools
Other technologies & Buzzwords
  • PHP Frameworks: Symfony, CodeIgniter, FuelPHP, Silex, Slim
  • JavaScript: Node.js, Express.js, Vue.js, React.js, Webpack
  • Go Lang 1.18
  • Databases: MySQL, MariaDB, PostgreSQL, Redis
  • Testing: phpUnit, CodeCeption, Cypress.io, Puppeteer, Selenium
  • Virtual Machines: Docker, Vagrant
  • AWS: S3, SQS, Route53, IAM
  • Dokku, ElasticSearch, Gearman, Bitbucket CI, Vagrant
  • C#, Unity 3D

Interests

Unity 3D and C#

Sometimes when I feel that in the Web domain nothing new is happening at the moment (of course I'm not counting when another new javascript framework or library is born :D) I switch to my hobby. Game development!
I'm a big fan of Real-time strategy games, so I'm making a hobby project inspired by many RTS games, such as Age of empires, Starcraft, Warcraft

Other

I'm an indoor person, I like spending time at home playing video or board games. But we all need some physical activity so when the weather is good outside I never miss a chance to play soccer with my friends.

I'm not a big fan of TV serials, so guess I have plenty of time saved... for coding and learning more!

Dreaming

I hope one to make something massive and important for the world or at least the IT world

I hope one day I'll rule a company in CTO role