My name is Dima, and I am an engineer. I enjoy putting software together piece by piece and then looking at the result. For me, it feels like a dopamine rush — the same kind of feeling many people get from doomscrolling, but for me it works this way.

Throughout my career, I have worked in different companies and across various domains. I haven’t worked in any famous corporations or top giants — no. I am just an engineer making my way through mistakes, successes, good managers, bad managers, poor engineering decisions as well as good ones. A lot has happened in my career, but I always try to take lessons from my experiences and turn them into a benefit for myself, rather than letting them get stuck in my mind as stressful situations that I keep replaying. Though, of course, that also happens —we are all human.

I started my career as a software engineer, but for the most part I have worked with frontend. I really enjoy developing for users. For me, it is important that a product delivers value and a good experience to the user, so I always ask myself: “Have we made the right decision?” or “Is this convenient?”. These questions have saved me more than once, and we ended up delivering better solutions in the projects I worked on.

At the moment, I position myself as a full-cycle engineer — in the job market this is usually called a full-stack engineer. I really enjoy it. When I work on a feature end to end, I feel fulfilled. It’s amazing when you connect all the pieces from start to finish and it actually works. By the way, I am not very good at DevOps. Throughout my career, there were always people in the team who took that role and filled the gap. I’ve been lucky to work with great DevOps engineers, so in this domain I’m only so so. Still, I can set up CI/CD when needed, though of course it depends on the scale — if you know what I mean…

When it comes to the values I follow in life, one of the most important is that every person has their own personal boundaries, and everyone should be respected as you would respect yourself. This is especially important when we talk about working relationships. I believe that at work we should remain professional and be able to express our opinions or decisions even under pressure — in a professional way, without getting personal or showing our ego. I know this is difficult -human nature often pushes us to do the opposite. But I truly believe that acknowledging personal boundaries and recognising that others have them too is already a step towards mutual respect and understanding — which are extremely important.

Sometimes I contribute to open source. At first, I thought about adding links to some projects here, but I think it makes more sense just to check my GitHub if you’re curious. I believe open source is a very important part of being a developer. Every day we use ready solutions for free. So if you have the skill and the time, look for a good first issue in your favourite project.