richard.@popelis.sk

About

I’ve been building web apps for over a decade now, mostly backends, frontends when needed, and a steady stream of internal tools that made my teammates’ days easier. I like code that still makes sense six months later, APIs that hold up when traffic shows up, and figuring out why the old system is slow before I start rewriting it. Mostly I just enjoy making things work well.

Skills

Experience

1. Senior Backend / Full-Stack Developer — eFabrica, a.s. Jul 2021 – now
   Bratislava
   • Built the TV guide backend for oneplay.cz. It handles thousands of concurrent requests and comes back in under 50 ms, which took some doing.
   • Worked across the whole stack: Symfony, Nette, Bun, Nest.js on the backend, Vue and plain JS on the frontend.
   • Moved the team off Vagrant and onto Docker, so local setups finally behaved like production and new people were running on day one instead of day three.
   • Wrote a handful of internal libraries to take the boring, repetitive stuff off everyone’s plate.
   • Took some big, old production codebases and dragged them into the present: updated dependencies, closed security gaps, got them onto proper deployment pipelines.
2. Full-Stack Developer — Profesia Dec 2018 – Aug 2021
   Bratislava
   • Helped steer the technical side of a small three-person team across Symfony, Vue, Node and TypeScript.
   • Built a WebSocket + pub/sub setup for real-time, event-driven data.
   • Set up automated testing from scratch with Cypress and PHPUnit, so we could ship without holding our breath.
   • Wrote a Word and LibreOffice document parser to automate some genuinely painful back-office file wrangling.
   • Looked after the Docker setup and kept the code-quality checks honest.
3. PHP Developer — Everlution s.r.o. Apr 2016 – Sep 2017
   Slovakia
   • Built B2B web apps in PHP/Symfony for some serious clients, including UK government agencies.
   • Worked directly with the UK product team to iterate quickly.
   • Did the responsive frontends with Bootstrap and jQuery.
   • Used Docker for local dev and worked in a fast-moving SCRUM team.
4. Full-Stack Web Developer — Freelance (self-employed) Feb 2012 – Mar 2016
   Bratislava
   • Designed, shipped and maintained business sites and platforms for clients (Rialex.sk, PoppyServices.eu, CarPartner.sk).
   • Built a few e-commerce shops from scratch (Sunway.sk, Saprem.sk, Idral.sk).
   • This is where I actually learned the PHP/Laravel ecosystem, by getting things wrong on real projects until they worked.
5. Founder & Full-Stack Developer — S-Servers.com Jan 2011 – Dec 2011
   Bratislava
   • Started an automated Minecraft server hosting company. I was 14.
   • Built the whole thing myself: a custom hosting control panel in Python and PHP, automated billing, support channels.
   • Grew it to around 20 regular customers through forum posts, and picked up more about product-market fit and customer service than I realized at the time.

Education

• Slovak University of Technology · Faculty of Informatics and Information Technologies 2016 – 2021

  Finished studies in Information Security