Ivan Anishchuk
Backend Software Development Ninja (Python/Django)
This page should explain in a little more detail my professional experience and skills. But it's a long story and I'll start from the most recent and relevant. I do backends and lead nerds for fun and for living.
Most recently I has been working almost solely with Python/Django/DRF/Celery/Postgres stack (plus or minus a few libraries) or at least with some kind of backend. Some of my projects were actually kinda cool starting with subject matter (improving civil aviation, giving people free music, helping them to hear again to name a few) but my role and beauty of my own work is pretty much irrelevant to that, that's how I'd talk about what I do at a pub. Setting up dev processes and tools, scaffolding new projects, making sure teamwork happens naturally and comfortably, early high-level research and architectural planning, implementing the bulk of the first minimal prototype in a way that allows fleshing details out gradually without early major rewrites, being the one who motivates everyone to keep improving code quality either by example or with some gentle guidance, predicting pitfalls and being ready for urgent optimization and refactoring when everything goes as expected, spending hours in technical discussions that seemingly lead to almost nothing yet somehow create shared culture, those parts I like the most about what I do. They are hard to describe, to showcase, or even translate to a new environment sometimes, meanwhile everybody can code given good requirements. Asking the right questions to clarify the requirements in areas not even thought of before, that's a skill I value more than coding. But I can code, of course, probably a bit better than most, my work is almost always mostly coding and I like it that way. Managers are extremely valuable exactly because people like me don't like doing organizational things. Working with people one on one is something I not only tolerate but sometimes excel at, give me a few hourly sessions and I can teach anyone a few helpful tricks and learn a lot myself. I also can write okay technical English but don't have enough discipline to be responsible for documentation maintenance.
Before the web era (and it started a long time ago for me, more than a decade) I made some desktop office software, worked sysadmin and tech support jobs, completed a few random projects like scripts and data scrapers. I can still set up a web server with my eyes closed, both bare metal and modern orchestrated cloud containers. Valuable experience, not going back to that, but I can collaborate with DevOps specialists and help straighten ops out from the dev perspective and sometimes even enjoy it.
And before that I was thinking about an academic career and studied serious math and cryptography but never bothered to graduate. It was fun actually. It was where I was first introduced to Python (2.4 was the current stable version at the time.)
And even before all that I started programming for fun and using desktop Linux. First "hello world" was over two decades ago (must've been around 2003 but I don't remember much details.)