Roman Liutikov

In my brief time at Whimsical I've worked with a team of talented engineers. We shipped notifications, improved performance of the mupltiplayer sync system and created internal CSS-in-ClojureScript library. I left Whimsical due to personal reasons, to take time off work and focus on my personal life.

Remote again. I was looking for yet another challenge after years of working on traditional websites and dashboards. Pitch has turned out to be not only a great opportunity to become a part of a challenging product engineering-wise, but also a great company that values people and promotes making impact through freedom and by taking responsibility. I've joined the company in its first year and went through multiple stages of its life, I learnt to adapt and understand the need for constant reflection on what we are doing and re-focusing when needed. At Pitch I'm known for my technical expertise and ability to drive cross-team efforts. Apart from taking a part in implementing critical components of product's front-end I also dedicated 2 years to web performance efforts by forming a small team and driving multiple initiatives that resulted in significant improvements in product's performance across the board. We promoted performance mindset within engineering department, created observability tooling and worked with product teams to make sure that we all understand the value of performance and are able to work with it independently, as a part of normal feature development process. Pitch has also adopted a UI library that I developed in the open as their main UI framework. I've driven the adoption and migration process, which was quite successful judging from the feedback of leadership and fellow engineers. I also concluded a series of workshops on Clojure for new hires that helped them to become effective programmers much faster. I was also a part of AI team who explored how modern day AI systems can bring value to customers by improving their experience with the product.

Back to the office. At that time I was looking for a Clojure job, the language has sparkled my interest in building UIs in a different way. Attendify was a local Clojure shop building an event management platform. As a software engineer I've participated in and initiated development of multiple front-end systems within the product.

Worked on a number of greenfield projects for a small agency. It was a perfect find for a young software engineer like me, who was eager to learn and acquire experience, make mistakes and learn from them. At that time I've learnt React, tried myself in mobile dev with React Native and got introduced to functional programming via Clojure.

My first job in an office with a proper team and far from home. I see those two years as my way to learn what it entails to work in a team and be a part of a larger org in general.

The time when I dropped out of university and decided to dedicate all of my time to learn to code and make some money from it. I've worked on a variety of projects, from simple landing pages and fun interactive animations to mobile-first web apps built with Backbone. I've learned a lot about web development and the hurdles of freelancing during this time.

Open source software has played a big role in my career development both in terms of expanding my knowledge and learning to maintain software products that people use.

I'm an occasional speaker at tech meetups and conferences. Also given that I enjoy teaching people, I've done a number of programming workshops and private mentoring classes.