Location: Slovakia/Czech Republic, EU

Remote: Yes, please

Willing to relocate: Yes, but can not fully until approx. Jul/Aug 2019. Strongly prefers at most 12h driving distance to Slovakia

Technologies: Ruby/Rails (10 years), C (14 years), JavaScript, C#, Pascal/Delphi, Git, Linux, AWS, DevOps, CI, virtualization, Docker, Nginx, Postgres, Redis, ElasticSearch, ELK; UX, commodity webcam gaze tracking, Tobii gaze trackers; UX/SWE/RS research; Lisp, Prolog, some Python

Résumé/CV: will provide a nicely formatted chronological CV if needed

Email: martin [at] labaj.sk

Github: Most of my previous work is private/NDA, but some rubygems forks/MOOC classes/CTO'd e-learning system/current Advent of Code 2018 solutions are to be found here: https://github.com/mlabaj

A tech talk example (local Ruby community, in Slovak/English slides, meme pictures of company cat included!): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uqt3QiGxJ8M

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Hi, I will be finishing my PhD. in Intelligent Information Systems in the next few months (long-long overdue after my many-years-ago magna cum laude MEng./CEng. in Software Engineering). As my uni/ contract/side projects work is finishing up, I’m currently looking for new challenges and opportunities: full-time, part-time, or contract work. Can issue EU invoices.

I started with Pascal/ASM more than 20 years ago, switched to C/C++ in order to use STL at programming competitions, then dabbled with Java/C# to finally be encharmed with the simplicity and rapid prototyping of Ruby (and Rails) 10 years ago which I still use to this day. This year, I rediscovered the C# and was amazed of the great strides it and the whole ecosystem has made from 2006. And the return from untyped scripting's "every error is a runtime error" to "if it compiles, it is halfway there" was very refreshing.

My most recent projects include end-to-end (IE 10+ compliant universal client-side JS collector, ElasticSearch storage, RoR backend, D3.js visualization) menu clicks analyzer, PCI-compliant payment subscription system in RoR for a local startup, or Eclipse Java plugin C#-based AST MCDC test generator for MISRA C code for a large automotive corporation.

Most of my professional life, starting as a technical translator and ending with recent contract Rails/C# work, has been remote.

I have passion for tuning and maintaining systems to their max capacity, whether it is my home Core i9 development machine with Xming Hyper-V Mint/Kali (WSL/VMware cannot even compare), a puny little virtualized server for an adaptive e-learning system used during classes, a startup's AWS infrastructure, or my car, which hasn’t seen a 3rd party service in 4 years.

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Pros:

Strong algorithmic background (ACM ICPC, SPOJ, TopCoder division one, NASA ISS Longeron Challenge, currently teaching Data Structures and Algorithms), theoretical background (NP, Turing-completeness, etc.).

Strong background in implicit and explicit user tracking on the Web, from page visits and clicks to gaze tracking; worked on commercially-deployed Recommender Systems including DevOps.

Some security background, hackmes, crackmes, CTFs, reverse engineering. Some OPSEC.

Some data science background (Jupyter experience, but I prefer Ruby, Bash and tuned PostgreSQL window functions before I dive into Python in there :), member of Data Science research group).

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Cons:

Jack of all trades – master of none? I never went head-dive depth-first into any concrete technology, took them up breadth-first as they were optimal for the task at hand. If you are looking for someone who can recite all index types in Postgres from memory on a whiteboard, I may not be your guy (erm, and I even taught undergrad DBS classes, shame on me). If the position is suited for someone well-rounded/full-stack with backend emphasis/some Sec, someone who lives in the docs and RFCs (even the avian carriers one) and can get up to speed on any given tech stack/language/paradigm/API/task in days’ time, let’s talk about it!