ASL?

My name is Stefan and I'm a software engineer. I bounce around between Hackney in east London, Thailand and Berlin.

What do you do for a living?

I build web applications and data visualisations. Sometimes I bring in other devs to make small teams to deliver for clients.

Is that it?

I also do some design and UX work. I have UX training from Tog at Neilson Norman Group and used to work in journalism as a producer back in the day for TV and radio. My first full-time tech job was designing and building fancy banner ads for InSkin. I have also lectured at university level including leading the delivery of Contextual Studies units at Ravensbourne.

What technology do you use?

I work in Angular, React, Svelte, .NET, Node, sql, nosql and other things. For stand alone data-visualisations I tend to use Svelte because of how quickly it is able to work with large numbers of DOM elements. I tend to do a lot of custom SVG work and lots of data pre-processing in JS. For hosting I currently favor AWS Amplify due to its scalability and ease of CI/CD setup, but I have used Azure extensively including AD/B2C and have dabbled in Firebase also.

What's your split between front and back end?

I am most senior in the front end, but I have built complex data-driven full stack applications that can swiftly handle millions of rows of data.

Management experience?

I have lead front end teams, including multiple outsourced teams. I have lead delivery of university courses with multiple other lecturers working with me. I have managed and trained radio DJs. I sometimes form small outsourced teams for clients.

We work with Agile and do some flavor of SCRUM. Do you know what that is?

I’ve worked with many flavours of Agile in my career as a developer and consultant. Many of the organisations I’ve worked with use SCRUM, but I also have experience with Kanban and other processes. SCRUM can be especially useful in agency environments and when working with outsourced teams. Kanban can also work extremely well especially when multi-disciplinary teams are able to be properly aligned with the company's goals and are able to get up close and personal with users and stakeholders. In any case, sticking to agile principles of continuous delivery and self-organisation is key to the successful application of whichever methodology a team uses.

So... do you like other things?

I'm interested in art and technology. Like a lot of programmers I read more science than I understand. I enjoy prototyping nonsense experiences on the web. I like cycling and hiking. I like thinking about people and the things we collectively go through as societies, that kind of boring stuff.

You're really loosing me. Can I just look at your insta or twitter or something?

I'm not really interested in social media so I won't have any interesting accounts to look at. I have linkedin and github.

I've noticed the git repo for this site is called Bistromatic. How many code names did you have to go through before choosing that one?

You want me to say 42 don't you?

Would you like to give a shout out to anyone?

My art heroes are Marcel Duchamp, Richard Hamilton and Martin Creed. Also my wife Pariya who is an awesome branding designer.

One last thing... Why is the UX on this website so weird?

Why are YOU so weird???