Nearcut is a quickly growing SaaS for barbers and therapists, based in London and Berlin, and built on Ruby on Rails with a thick client-side layer. In Nearcut, I worked as a full-stack developer and had been contributing to the product for almost 3 years.

Having merged several hundred PRs, I was involved in a variety of domains, from redesigning current features like reminders/watchers, extending reports and dashboards, to building new features from scratch, like Statistics or Yearly Recap projects. Among the things I'm especially proud of are domain-specific PWAs which eased barbers/therapists their routine tasks, and brand new Onboarding Flow, which dramatically increased lead generation quality.

Besides, I also mastered working with many third party APIs which Nearcut is integrated with: Stripe, PostHog, Giropay, Urlbox, and many others.

CreditFlowResearch is a financial analysis and trade market data platform, originated in Boston, MA. I joined the CFR team as a sole developer and was responsible for the entire product, from design to development, deployment, and maintenance.

CFR was built as close to Rails conventions as possible, with a thin JS layer packed into atomized and reusable Stimulus controllers and components. All the critical CFR infrastructure was running on AWS: Elastic Beanstalk for web, RDS for database, S3 for storage, SES for emails, SNS for notifications, etc. I developed interfaces for editors and traders, added a powerful, auto-updating news feed with companies/industries filtering, maintained a set of reports and dashboards, etc.

One of the greatest things I maintained at CFR was handling 70-100 thousand of emails sent daily with a read tracking. However, after identifying that even minor delay in email delivery could cost financial analysts a lot, on top of that we implemented a CFR API and a flexible webhooks interface. This made our material delivery blazing fast, and our service more effective.

CustomTattooDesign is a Canadian tattoo design agency, and I joined this company as a part-time, sole Rails developer for a 3-month period.

Intriguing part of CTD was their stack and business model: a Wordpress-driven marketing website and a Rails-backed admin space with a layer of API and hooks which maintained a connection between them. I was responsible for adding new features to their Rails part of the business and polished their application flow: customers create applications, platform provides the best affiliated artists, artists accept/decline the applications, we track progress and charge affiliates for the leads.

CTD was a great place to examine Rails flexibility when dealing with legacy code and a non-standard business logic. During my relatively short period at CTD, I enhanced the artist dashboard and project management tool (each project has a timeline for smaller tasks), which altogether led to better lead quality and customer engagement.

The Virtual Quilt is a Californian lifestyle online digest with user-generated content – fancy and inspiring pics and vids. This was a several months long, part-time position of a sole Rails developer.

I crafted TVQ's first version from scratch, implementing both Ruby on Rails backend and a rather advanced frontend layer in vanilla JavaScript. The platform included authentication, content moderation flow, responsive design for mobiles/tablets, and more.

Fun part of TVQ to mention is auto-updatable map of user locations, which I implemented with Google Maps API, image EXIF data parsing and some third-party services for location detection.

FCFV.ru (Russian: ФКФВ.ру or just ФКФВ) – my life-long personal hobby project. I'm an ardent supporter of FC Fakel Voronezh for more than 25 years, and FCFV is the online community of its fans. FCFV is a modern revision of sports guestbooks of 1990s, with a focus on excellent user experience and deep engagement.

I'm the sole developer and maintainer of the project. With more than 2,400 commits within 13 years, FCFV has a decent history of rewrites: from Cotonti (CMS written in PHP) to Yii2 (also PHP), to Ruby on Rails 6. At the moment, FCFV runs on Rails 8 and enjoys all the freshest Rails ecosystem tools like Hotwire and Stimulus. The project is built with ESbuild and deployed with Hatchbox to a Caddy-powered VPS.

FCFV serves around 10k MAU and successfully handles usage peaks in match days. Apart from guestbook itself, FCFV has a number of such unique features as a forecasts contest, yearly awards, players stats library, and more. After these 13 years, FCFV established a remarkable core of loyal users who arrange offline activities, purchase our T-shirts, and support the club together.

BykovFM (Russian: БыковФМ) is a collection of public talk quotes from Dmitry Bykov, well-known Russian literary critic, poet, writer, journalist, public figure and extraordinary storyteller. FM is there because Bykov was once famous for weekly 3-hour radio lectures about world literature.

BykovFM is a casual Rails setup with a simple admin interface (great Administrate gem from Thoughtbot). However, working with quotes goes far beyond a boring CRUD as it allows dealing with tags, mentions, links to related arts on the go (all built with Stimulus).

When launching the project in 2022, I found another Bykov fan on the web and she scrupulously did all the editorial work for a couple years. Currently, I'm planning to add user quote submission flow for expanding the collection.

A purely niche project, BykovFM nontheless enjoys a rather decent traffic of 22-24k MAU with up to 70-75k page views monthly.

AWSM Devs is a place for developers where they can write a testimonial about their experience with colleagues, leave a shoutout to open-source contributors, and so forth. A classic Rails 8 setup, this project is currently in the development phase. It will hopefully be fully operational in 2025.

As a new testimonial (ping, in my terminology) is created, we send an email notification to the pinged user. A fun challenge when building AWSM Devs was deciding how we get a user email when their ping arrives. I came up with an idea to use not only disclosed email from profile, but also scan users' open-source commits and grab their email from there. Of course user is able to unsubscribe from ping emails any time with a single click.

The very first ping I wrote was for John Nunemaker for his awesome work on HTTParty gem. You can ping me as well!