👋 I'm currently looking for work - ping me at work@zgajner.com if you're interested.
If I had to compress my entire career into a few bullet points, I'd say:
In the past year, I've gained extensive experience working with LLMs from various angles. At my current employer, we built a product for managing AI assets in large organizations, which required a lot of interaction with AI tools and pushed me to dive into the grittier details of coding harnesses. I also implemented features that used LLMs heavily in production (e.g. for autogenerating skills based on a codebase, analyzing AI chat sessions and creating reports on AI use in a company).
During this time, our development practices also transitioned to using LLMs extensively. We actively exchanged knowledge and assets (e.g. skills) across the team. Automated workflows were set up to perform PR reviews, generate reports and solve more trivial issues without human intervention. Many of our processes had to be adjusted to adopt LLMs more efficiently.
This made me well prepared to seamlessly join another organization with a similar level of AI adoption or guide a similar transition in an organization that isn't there yet.
My languages of choice would be JavaScript/TypeScript and Python, purely based on the amount of my experience with them. I did a lot of work on Django projects (supported by Celery and Elasticsearch) and my go-to frontend framework is Vue (often with Nuxt and Tailwind), which I've used heavily since v0.9. That's an intentionally short list of things where I consider myself very experienced and ready to jump in from day one. I've worked with various languages, frameworks and technologies in my professional career, but listing all of them here makes little sense.
As far as development practices go, I'm a fan of strict typing, test-driven development, pair programming and mandatory code reviews. I enjoy deploying to production on a daily basis and everything that comes with that, like optimizing infrastructure, reducing deploy times, increasing test coverage and expanding CI/CD checks.
2020 - 2026
I'm currently at Sleuth, a startup that produced a few different developer tools, mostly related to gathering metrics, reporting and improving team performance. The most successful one was Sleuth DORA, a tool that allows organizations to accurately track their DORA metrics and deploy more often. We also built Pulse, an automated reporting platform for aligning engineering and business, and recently pivoted to Skills.new, a tool for managing various AI-related assets at organization scale.
Our toolkit mostly consists of Django on the backend and Vue with Nuxt on the frontend. I'm in a full-stack role, building complete features from spec to deployment.
2017 - 2020
I joined Reciprocity as a front-end contractor and eventually became one of the more senior team members. As the entire organization grew, I was able to take on many interesting responsibilities such as conducting technical interviews at various stages, coordinating the front-end guild and organizing hackathons. My last year with them, I had the pleasure of leading the Bergdoktor team that was responsible for internal platform development.
2016 - 2017
At United.Cloud, I was involved in the development of a smart TV app that was part of a new IPTV platform. It was a standard TV interface with features one would typically expect, such as viewing live channels, browsing programme guides, streaming VoD content etc. Because it had to be multiplatform, we implemented it as a JavaScript app based on Vue.js with the addition of a few official modules. I was one of the most senior team members responsible for a lot of technical/architectural decisions. The application has been in production in the entire Balkans for a while under the EON brand.
2015 - 2016
Celtra is a multinational company that specializes in mobile advertising. As a member of the Dashboard team, I helped develop part of Celtra's AdCreator platform, an interactive analytics dashboard for ad management. Most of the application was written in CoffeeScript and based on Backbone with some parts in Vue.
2013 - 2015
I spent two years at Astina (which became Origammi after a merger), a Swiss-Slovenian software company. I worked as a front-end developer on the Ljubljana team, covering projects of various sizes, mostly built with Symfony2. My work consisted of design implementation (SASS, custom structure based on SMACSS, different frameworks depending on project requirements), RIA development (based on AngularJS), asset pipeline management (Grunt configurations) and occasional UX tasks (prototyping).
2012 - 2013
Goclick is a Slovenian web advertising company and one of the biggest Google AdWords resellers in Southeast Europe. They employed me as a web programmer with the intent to perform previously outsourced development in-house. The work mainly consisted of designing structure and implementing design for medium-sized websites. The software used varied depending on the project and included Jekyll, Drupal, Ubercart and Shopify.
2012
Slidemotion was a startup that offered a service for simple automated creation of video slideshows from Facebook photo albums based on likes and comments. I developed the client-side of the web application that was the primary user interface for the service using jQuery and Facebook SDK for JavaScript.
2011 - 2012
At Radio Študent, I was the lead developer on the project of a major website overhaul. Since it was done mostly voluntarily, the process took over a year and posed many challenges. We needed to consider the workflow of over 150 active contributors, design a sensible structure for a large amount of daily produced content on various topics and implement custom functionalities to cover specifics of the working process.
On the technological side, we used Drupal 7 and a bunch of modules that allowed us to (among other things):
2007 - 2011
Fora developed an entire IPTV platform called Perception, for which I helped develop the software that ran on set-top boxes for end-users. These devices ran a browser, so everything was created using standard front-end web technologies (HTML/CSS/JS) and a sprinkle of proprietary APIs for stream-playing functionality. We developed a TV interface that was a large asynchronous one-page web application.