Hi there, I'm Simonas. I work as a glorified bit flipper.

I have been programming professionally for more than 7 years. At work, I'm mostly doing backend stuff. Curiously enough, at all of my previous roles I've managed to end up fiddling with front-end, too.

At my current role, I write mostly Scala code and build microservices on top of Kafka, MySQL, and various in-house tools. During my earlier stints I have had the pleasure of using Python, TypeScript, Java, PostgreSQL, Docker, and a bunch of other technologies. I'm also quite familiar with Django and React, and have a few personal projects where I use them heavily. For this blog, though, I decided to try Next.js and TailwindCSS.

In my free time, I split my time among backend, frontend, and lately a bit of infrastructure. I also had a brief affair with Dart/Flutter while developing a proof of concept mobile app when Flutter was in its infancy.

Education-wise, I have masters degree in Software Development and an undergraduate degree in Psychology (both awarded by University of Glasgow). I find that rigorous psychology studies have given me many of the tools required for successful software development career, not to mention the appreciation of human psyche and complexity of challenges other disciplines face.

On a personal note, I have found software development somewhat later in life (in my early 20s). I compensate this tardiness with a voracious consumption of computer science and software engineering related reading: innards of the databases, programming languages, algorithms, operating systems, computer networks. I am not an expert on any of those topics, but if I find something remotely interesting written on those topics, chances are I will read it (and might even begrudgingly watch videos). Eventually.