Mykola Bilokonsky

About

Software is magic - you use the right incantations and bam! Reality changes! It delights people! I love to delight people! Much of my career in software has been built around that premise. Let's talk about how I can bring delight to your organization!

Experience

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    Senior Software Engineer, 

     —    a year

    I started at Mode the week they closed their office for the Covid-19 Pandemic and have been helping them dig out from under technical debt ever since.

    • Led CircleCI Migration that reduced build time on PRs from an hour to 12 minutes.
    • Proposed and initiated a migration to GraphQL, modernizing our workflows and simplifying our codebase.
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    Senior Software Engineer, 

     —    2 years

    • Designed and implemented GDPR compliance across a half-dozen services both internal and external.
    • Shipped product features for web, mobile and server-side projects, as well as internal services.
    • Created and led a mental health initiative for colleagues that was well-received and continues to this day.
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    Software Engineer, 

     —    a year

    • Reduced app startup time by an order of magnitude
    • Designed and convinced management to authorize my team to implement an entirely new version of the product for deployment in San Francisco, using React/Redux for the front-end and microservices for the backend. Code base was an order of magnitude smaller, iterative incremental feature addition became possible.
    • Wrote a train arrival time service in Elixir that pulled data from a variety of unreliable sources to attempt to provide a best-guess estimate, as far as I know the most advanced such tool available for MTA arrival data.
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    Instructor (Side Hustle), 

     —    5 years

    • Several thousand people have completed my 48-minute course on reducing arrays, with rave reviews.
    • Courses on Devtools have helped thousands of developers level up their debugging skills.
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    Special Agent, 

     —    7 years

    I sometimes help Test Double's clients solve their web development problems. I specialize in medium-term solo deployments where I advise on a strategy and design, implement requirements and provide regular feedback to ensure the client is getting the most out of engaging me.

    • Designed and implemented a suite of reference implementations for accessible web components
    • Created a framework for emulating an embedded software system in the browser for training purposes.
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    Tech Lead,  Skai (formally Coral Networks)

     —    3 years

    Skai was a tech startup developing a distributed graph database and computational fabric. Though I initially joined to work on front-end demos, I quickly became the senior platform engineer and worked on all aspects of the product.

    • We operated in parallel at huge scale, writing millions of entities per second across dozens of nodes in a hadoop cluster, pursuing and attaining horizontal scalability
    • I wrote the core backend in Java, including a proprietary serialization mechanism that was like a heavily customized protobuff, and various stream-based mechanisms that allowed changes to be broadcast to subscribing systems between networks and down to browsers via websockets
    • I was responsible for all front-end work, building out various tools (primarily in angular) to showcase interesting aspects of the technology

Education

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    English Literature and Japanese, with minors in History and Philosophy, Bachelor of Arts

     —    5 years

    Ohio State University

References

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    Test Double has had the pleasure of working with Myk across a number of projects, and we wouldn't hesitate to pull him into another opportunity again. Our company prides itself on building software with high levels of quality and Myk aligns with our philosophies there very well. His technical skills are obviously first rate, but more importantly he is completely at ease communicating with business owners, stakeholders and management about the approach, priorities, timelines and other constraints that we face on our projects. We are confident that when working with Myk, even on some of our most challenging projects, that he will delight our customers in the end.

    Todd Kaufman, Co-Founder of Test Double
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    Myk is a one-of-a-kind developer, technologist and human being. Skai was my first software development job, and I literally couldn't have asked for a better mentor than Myk. No only did he patiently walk me through the fundamentals of programming and web application architecture, but I learned every day from the example he set: carefully crafted code, clean and comprehensive unit tests, elegantly architected systems, and a deep-rooted kindness that permeates all his interactions. I feel incredibly lucky to have had a mentor like Myk.

    Dan Baneman, colleague at Skai
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    Introducing Myk into our team gave us a much broader perspective on our codebases. He regularly pushed us to think one abstraction step further, and to consider all potential ramifications of our work. Keeping this up in a fast paced environment is no easy feat. This made him a great colleague, a solid engineer and a good person to spend time with.

    Orta Therox, colleague at Artsy
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    Myk helped our team untangle a big thorny mess of a platform, and brought it to a stable, well-tested, and maintainable place. He's thorough, committed, and kind, and loves to talk about big ideas. Best of all, he cares deeply about the impact his work has on people, and his thoughtfulness carries through in everything he does.

    Ben Haas, Software Engineering Manager, Intersection
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    Myk is a very strong engineer who is capable of going deep on big problems. In addition to helping me understand technical problems, he has taught me many things about being human.

    Steve Hicks, Tech Lead at Artsy