Fullstack Developer
I'm a fullstack developer looking to improve the digital world one step at a time. I have a passion for learning and enjoy challenges.
I started my coding journey in primary school in 2018, when I was chosen to participate in a QBasic and C++ school programming competition. After winning 3rd place, I convinced our teachers to switch to the superior C++ language, where I saw the syntax was much clearer - I won 2nd place. I continued competing in C++ competitions throughout high school, and even making it to nationals, where I won 17th and 13th place in the years 2021. and 2022., respectively. In the meantime, I finished Colt Steele's course on web development, where I learned HTML, CSS, JS, JQuery, EJS, NodeJS, Express, MongoDB, Mongoose etc. It was a great quickstart for further studying.
Sequentially, I started playing around in Unity - probably the most fun period of my programming career. I can't count the number of hilarious bugs in my games that happened in development. For example, when making a Super Mario bros. clone, I tried to make Mario break a block after hitting it from below. After having touched the block, Mario and the block just started both floating upwards, which was comical. Since these projects are very old, I successfully recovered and pushed the code from them, since that is (what I suppose) people usually look for in GitHub profiles.
After making small projects using the technologies I've learned, I learned of this frontend technology called React, and immediately liked it. Then, a tutorial about websockets (precisely, Socket.io) showed up on my feed, so I decided to check it out. That birthed the second project on my GitHub, a multiplayer word game called Dopuni.ba.
During this period, my math entrance exam for the Faculty of Electrical Engineering in Sarajevo was held on July 4th. After passing it with a perfect score, I decided to put my math skills to the test by trying to recreate the rotating ASCII donut, the third project on my GitHub. It was a challenge, but I quickly understood that it was quite feasable. The performance of my solution was slow, but it was working. After that, I checked out the original code and saw that I was 90% correct, I just needed optimization tricks, such as not using container structures where they weren't necessary, and precalculating some hard to process values such as sines and cosines of angles that change every 1/60th of a second.
I had the confidence to tackle the final boss at the time, which is to create a fullstack application with requirements of programming companies in Bosnia and Herzegovina. This is the fourth project, Media Catalogue, whose code is not available on my GitHub for specific reasons, but the demo video is. There I learned more about React, Java, Quarkus, PostgresQL, relational databases, performance techniques, architectures and design patterns and much more, which put me in a neat spot in terms of my skills - a junior programmer. But I knew this is not a stopping point. I needed to keep learning.
In the beginning of 2024., I gave Neovim a shot, and found my workflow got much, much faster. In the summer of 2024. I took an interest in Linux-based operating systems, and installed Arch on my laptop. With Linux knowledge, cloud technologies became much more feasable. I learned Docker, containerized apps and databases, and hosted them on DigitalOcean, Cloudflare and Hetzner with my own domain. I had only touched AI, just by using it from HuggingFace and considering it a blackbox. With this knowledge, I'm confident I can make it a service for a web app by hosting a Flask server on the cloud.
Currently, I'm studying at the Faculty of Electrical Engineering in Sarajevo, and using my skills to develop unofficial apps that can help the student/faculty experience.