How I got here
Dushanbe, then New York, then Austin. Eight years of software in between, four of them inside the mobile operator of a country of ten million people.
If you want the short, warm version, it is on the front page. This is the longer one, with the dates attached.
Track
- 2023 – now
Full Stack Developer
Spitamen-IT, remote from Austin. Government systems: a management information system, a national export agency's portal, a records platform with availability requirements.
- 2022 – 2023
Software Development Manager
Tcell. E-commerce, self-service apps and a mobile wallet with banking integrations. Assembled and managed two DevOps teams.
- 2021 – 2022
Software Development Team Lead
Tcell. Led the mobile customer service app that cut SIM registration from fifteen minutes to one.
- 2019 – 2021
Senior IT Systems Specialist
Tcell. Intranet, CMS and document management, plus an in-house self-service tool that added two million in annual sales.
Where I learned the job
Four years at Tcell, the mobile operator of Tajikistan, took me from systems specialist to team lead to development manager. That work taught me the thing I still design around: a system is only as good as its worst day.
We built a customer service app that had to register SIM cards in high-mountain regions — places where mains power is intermittent and the link back to the capital is thin. Making it survive those conditions turned out to be a better design brief than any specification document. Registration went from fifteen minutes to one.
Somewhere in those years I also started the first Google Developers Group community in Dushanbe, for the simple reason that there wasn't one.
What I work on now
Since February 2023 I have worked from Austin as a full stack developer for Spitamen-IT, largely on systems for government agencies. The span is the point: on the same project I will build the interface, the API it calls, the schema underneath, and the deployment that puts it in front of users.
Government software has a particular quality that I have come to like. The users cannot pick a competitor. A clumsy interface is not a lost sale, it is somebody's lost afternoon in a queue. That raises the stakes on the unglamorous parts — validation, error messages, the form that should never have been three forms — and the unglamorous parts are where the time actually goes.
How I work
My degree is in information security, which shows up in how I treat infrastructure: hardening is part of the build, not a later ticket. I run the servers behind my own projects, including this site, so claims about deployment and TLS are ones I can be held to rather than ones I have read about. The stack page lays out the detail, including where my limits are.
I have worked in Agile and Scrum teams, I have run teams of my own, and I have worked remotely across an eleven-hour time difference for nearly four years. I would rather cut a feature than ship one that cannot be supported.
Details
- Education
- Master's degree, Organization and Technology of Information Security — five-year program, Technology University of Tajikistan, 2008–2013
- Certified
- Meta: HTML and CSS in Depth, Programming with JavaScript, Version Control. Google: Foundations of User Experience Design, Web Designer, My Business
- Languages
- English, Russian, Tajik
- Based
- Austin, Texas — Central Time
- Status
- Fully work authorized in the United States, no sponsorship required