I am a programmer. Other than regular software development, I dedicate a lot of my focus and effort on building platforms and tooling that enable and empower others to deliver.The following key phases had defining influence on me and shaped me as a professional:The inspiration. IBM <2015. I was coding in a regular waterfall-driven team with a bunch of barely tested code and some decades-old upstream backend services. Then, a third party consultancy joined the same project and started introducing crazy sounding things like DevOps and such. I was in awe of their skill and started observing, learning and absorbing their expertise.The light. Klarna ~2015. Joined a small, very modern at-the-time team, responsible for a few isolated services of a larger system and owning them end-to-end. No ops/infrastructure team, no QA team - it was all us. First true continuous delivery to production, comprehensive automated test suites, all infrastructure as code, my first exposure to AWS, us responsible for observability and alerting, etc. This is the way I follow to this day. The tools change and evolve, but the principles remain.Aristeia. Casumo ~2016-2019. This was my superhero role where I had complete autonomy and had major impact on the company's engineering culture. I helped a financially successful startup cope with an ever increasing load that the existing platform could not handle. I educated the team, architected and implemented the delivery, quality assurance/automated testing and observability practices. Loosened the coupling between separate deployment units of a massive distributed monolith. Refactored and made horizontally scalable the critical and problematic parts of the monolith.Below are some more points about me, some of which may or may not be red flags to potential clients, so I'd rather be honest and lay them out upfront.I thrive in environments with high degree of autonomy where I am trusted by the stakeholders and am empowered to get work done.I don't play well with middle managers who get in the way, and try to control, and micromanage how I work - I can manage my time and workload myself.I work remotely only. I left the office life and started my 100% remote journey in the beginning of 2016. I work from different places throughout the year and I adjust my working schedule as needed to not compromise the productivity of the team and the company.I work globally and charge global rates for my services. I refuse location-based (downgraded) pay because I was born in a region that historically had lower wages than some other places.