Hello ๐๐ป
My name is Yasen! Born in Bulgaria, moved to the Netherlands and have been living here since 2003. I like tech, video games and comic books. I talk alot and swear a bit.
I’m a programmer ๐ป
I’ve been computing forever. I have been lucky enough to be able to do it professionally since 2009. Over the years I’ve seen projects sink and soar and learned many lessons along the way.
Currently I’m the Head of Engineering at Blue10 . Here, I grow an expanding engineering department and think about cloud architecture. We are on our way to make accounting obsolete!
I build web applications
I cut my teeth in the late 2000’s when everyone needed a new responsive website. I’ve been building web applications ever since.
I started out programming in Django back in 2007. Over the years I’ve shipped all kinds of products (php, android, IOS, Rails, C++(Boost, QT,UE3). But, for the last 5-6 years I’ve settled on the Microsoft stack.
- C#
- .NET
- ASP.NET Core
- SQL Server
In the (Azure) cloud! โ๏ธ
The cloud made me realise that I am in fact lazy, and don’t want to deal with bare metal anymore. I want to solve problems and my wife won’t allow another server in the pantry. My favorite platform right now is Microsoft Azure, but any container host with an ESB, BLOB storage and SQL has a warm place in my heart.
I am passionate about the boring stuff ๐งน
To me, the boring stuff is the exciting stuff. In my experience, doing the boring stuff makes the fun stuff effortless.
- Development Environments
- CI/CD
- Documentation
- Requirements
- Tests
- Feedback channels
- Acceptance Criteria
- Access Control
- Intrumentation
- Incident management
- Auditing
If a project lets me focus on these support structures, the engineering will happen by itself. (almost ๐)
I design testable architectures ๐๏ธ
You’ll often find me slicing up systems in discrete, testable components.
I have a background in testing, so designing systems that you can verify to work as intended is my priority. My love-language is pedantic sanity checks.
I like Classic Machine Learning ๐ค*
Early on, I got in touch with Machine Learning. It got me on a path towards all kinds of ML topics:
- reinforcement learning
- genetic algorithms
- computer vision
- semantic recognition.
Using these techniques is a challenge. But, putting them to work on viable solutions to real problems is a different world. A neural network is not done, when it’s trained! It’s done when it’s delivering verifyable results to living users! ๐
* As of 2024 I feel the need make a distinction between AI in the sense of the Generative LLM tools that are becoming more widespread as of the time of writing and classical machine learning fundamentals on which the LLM tools are based. While I’m very excited about creating specialist machine learning applications, and I see how general purpose LLM tools can make users more productive, I’m hesitant to apply general purpose process automation using LLMs.
And I love gamedev ๐ฎ
Before I was a programmer, I was going to be an artist. One day a gamedev put a controller in my hand and made my art come alive on screen, and I fell in love with programming.
I like building games, whether that’s building stuff in Godot or rolling out a custom engine. You can find some fun projects on my GGJ profile and my itch.io
Gamedev tooling and technology has inspired me. There are some great ideas and techniques that have a place in a more businessy environment.
Reach out ๐
I like to talk about software and teams and architecture in the cloud. I’ve spent years teaching beginners the software development trade. I’m down for a gamejam and a hackathon. And I’m always up for meeting new people who like to talk art and tech.
