Mikhail Karavaev

Delivered a complete end-to-end application (a social platform) on a contract basis -Took full technical ownership across design, backend, frontend, DevOps, and deployment -Designed architecture, selected technologies, and implemented the system -Hired and coordinated freelance contributors (designers and developers) to accelerate development

Development of the back-end core for a large online gaming platform -Participation in feature planning -Design and implementation of back-end solutions -Support the rollout of new features -Writing and maintaining technical documentation -Conducting code reviews -Mentoring and onboarding of new developers

Development of an online gambling platform from scratch. Including Slot machines, Texas Holdem, Blackjack, and other games. The backend part was entirely my responsibility. I introduced service-oriented architecture and created a strong foundation for managing finances and other assets. So developing new games and working with assets became very easy to manage. The system has not lost track of a single cent of money throughout its existence, with its 10k+ users and volumes of $100k a month. Also, I gained much experience developing real-time online games such as Texas Holdem. As the system is closely coupled with cryptocurrencies, I also gained much experience developing pretty basic smart contracts and interacting with blockchains.

Contributed to the backend development of an online game, implementing gameplay-related features and developing the game's asset management system.

Here I worked on two projects: -A cryptocurrency exchange. -A distributed platform for video-stream analysis. First was the cryptocurrency exchange. I was one of the team members who developed new features. After some time, I’ve become the single developer on the project because I could cover all the project owner’s needs. I added integrations with different cryptocurrencies, resolved users’ problems, and developed new functionality, such as adding external integrations with banks and blockchains. The second project was the SaaS video-stream analysis platform. I architected the platform and implemented it from scratch. The idea of the project was to feed the live video streams into an AI-analysis app, collect its output, process the data, and draw some charts based on the data. The main complexity was that it could only be done in a distributed environment as the analysis itself required a lot of computation power. So I’ve implemented such a scalable distributed system, and it worked well.

I worked on my first two significant projects: -A website for online lawyer consulting (with instant messaging and instant payments). -An online shop. I developed both of the projects entirely from scratch. Back then, I thought it was a good idea not to use any high-level libraries and packages (even jQuery / Laravel / Symphony or any kinds of ORMs). This is why the development process took about half a year, ten hours a day. But eventually, we did very well and successfully finished both projects. And I gained much low-level experience. The projects had been alive and serving our clients for a couple of years until their owners replaced them with easier-to-manage substitutes.

Baby steps in commercial software development. First small projects and tasks using WordPress, pure PHP, vanilla JS, HTML, and CSS.