Hi there! My name is Nikolai Danylchyk. I'm based in Berlin and currently work for Google in Cloud Customer Engineer role.
My career started early with a great passion for 2D & 3D graphics. I learned a lot with Denthor of Asphyxia and NeHe back in the day. Somehow during my high school years (early 2000s) my focus shifted towards learning web development, plus I could make a buck or two. This evolved into a more professional career that even touched abstracting HP-UX for web exposure.
Some years later me and a good friend of mine founded a company called Página na Hora, basically a WYSIWYG website editor with all the bells and whistles, for the Portuguese startup scene. Fast forward some years and we sold it to Portuguese Yellow Pages. That is success in my book.
Afterwards I wanted to try working in a more _chaotic_ environment and moved to Berlin where I joined Rocket Internet for a couple of years. Call them infamous but I learned a lot and made some really good friends there.
From there I explored a career in being a head of engineering for an impressive self-funded multi-million EUR cashback business called Shoop. That taught me even more, so much that I was confident enough to try joining Amazon, and successfully I might add. That was another gentle monster that gave me unique knowledge and experience in a world that was brand new to me at the time.
All this past experience, eventually, led to me Google where I am still enjoying every single day of learning amazing stuff from extremely talented people. My main line of work is in Google Cloud but I was also lucky enough to be a tech lead for a collaboration between Google and public innovation laboratory operated by the non-profit Technologiestiftung Berlin and funded by the Berlin Senate Chancellery. One hell of a ride I must say.
As for what I do to entertain myself.. well, it's mostly hardware tinkering. Getting myself into robotics and bridging physical world with all the AI madness.
How I bridged the gap between YouTube Music and KEF LSX speakers using a lightweight Cast Receiver emulator and DLNA UPnP streaming.
Replacing clunky Wi-Fi captive portals on IoT devices with browser-based Web Bluetooth provisioning.
Why I built an open-source hardware and software controller for PC custom water loops to escape vendor bloatware and BIOS limitations.
A fast CLI and web tool written in Go that parses RS-274X Gerber paste layers and renders 3D printable STL solder stencils.
Decoupling dedicated multiplayer game server logic from Kubernetes sidecars with a clean Go mock SDK.
How I replaced commercial dynamic DNS subscriptions with a single Go Cloud Function and Cloud DNS managed zone for $0/month.