Why your contribution matters

My name is Konstantin. I am a hard-working software engineer, CTO, and mentor who donates a lot of time to various open-source projects. My first open-source project was in 1994 when I released a fast converter for Cyrillic texts (written in ANSI C) that converted from one encoding to another in milliseconds. I followed up with a birthday reminder app for Windows written in Visual Basic, and I have never stopped since. In fact, back then this used to be called shareware — a term long ago forgotten.

The ever-growing collection of MIT-licensed open-source ruby gems (libraries written in Ruby Language) has cumulatively been downloaded 140M (million) times.

The GitHub projects in other languages, such as CMake & C++, BASH, or Arduino, span sys-admin utilities, project templates, and autonomous self-driving robots.

While not all projects are universally popular or useful, building out such an open-source software portfolio takes a lot of time. You can help this endeavor by becoming a Github Sponsor. It would be very much appreciated.

♥️♥️♥️

Introduction

I've been lucky to have a unique, multifaceted, and diverse career in software engineering, distributed architectures, fault-tolerant systems, and web-scale applications. Throughout the years of scaling multi-user web applications, I gained a deep understanding of PostgreSQL, Ruby, Rails, BASH, agile technologies, automated testing, and so much more.

I occasionally write technical articles for my blog https://kig.re/, as well as ReinvetONE Substack, and consult through my company https://reinvent.one/ based in San Francisco, CA.

As of May 2024, I am a CTO and a co-founder of a supply chain automation company Made Technologies.

Career Journey

I've been called "a veteran of Internet Engineering," with over a quarter-century of professional experience in the industry. After graduating with distinction from Monash University with a master's degree in high-order mathematics and statistics, I realized that my heart was in software application development. So, I taught myself multiple programming languages, learned Linux, and released several apps as open-source as early as 1994.

My professional career began in Melbourne, Australia, working for the clients of a cutting-edge consultancy, Cybersource Pty Ltd. Shortly after moving to the San Francisco Bay Area, my career took off. I joined an edgy startup called Topica, Inc. as a Systems Architect and proceeded to design and build one of the most powerful email delivery engines on the planet with his team. By 2002, Topica was responsible for nearly 1% of all daily Internet Email. During those days, we all programmed in C, Perl, and Java.

Shortly after I learned Ruby and Ruby on Rails framework and was blown away by how much more productive I've become. My love of the language and the framework remains to this day.

Shortly after, I was invited to join several startups as a CTO or Director of Engineering; however, it wasn't until I became the co-founding CTO at Wanelo, Inc. that my long-standing hope of building a dream engineering team came true.

At Wanelo, circa 2012, and not without help, I was able to build a world-class engineering team and a process from scratch. The early team had to replace the Java prototype with a nimble Ruby on Rails application, including test coverage. After a seven-week rewrite, the team switched to the new codebase with just one hour of downtime and never looked back. The app's popularity climbed, ensuring a 100X traffic increase in the following months. The Wanelo engineering team, which some called the "Dream Team" and not without reason, maintained "four-nines" uptime for wanelo.com for years to come.

Around 2015, I founded a consultancy ReinventONE and worked with many companies in the Bay Area, helping them with scale, databases, design, architecture, developer tooling, and even leadership training.

I was also invited to speak at several high-profile conferences on a variety of subjects, from how to collect and aggregate event data at scale using a distributed object store to scaling web applications with PostgreSQL to the adoption of DevOps automation by Engineering teams through practices such as self-recovering proxies.