Track Record

This is the useful version of a case-study page: where I've worked, what I handled, and what those jobs taught me. Twenty-three years, different roles, different kinds of pressure.

Now

Technical leadership, long-term partnerships, and client work

Today my work is a mix of technical leadership, long-term partnerships, and hands-on client work.

SimpliHost. It's an early-stage PropTech SaaS company. I work with the founder, Beth, on roadmap calls, scope, release priorities, developer rhythm, hiring input, and the technical decisions that can otherwise sit unresolved for weeks.

MadeByOn. It's a UK web agency I've worked with since around 2015. It started as task-based contract work and grew from there. I've rescued old codebases, shipped work across frontend and backend, managed AWS infrastructure, and worked directly with their clients. Some of those clients have asked for me by name.

Ten years with the same team doesn't happen by accident. It happens when you show up, do solid work, and don't create drama.

Vaya Beach Resort. It's a premium resort on the Bulgarian coast. I support the team with web consulting and hands-on work. It's another relationship built on trust and repeat work.

Multiple streams of work, different contexts, shared standards.

2019–2025

700+ technical interviews

This ran alongside my client work.

From 2019 to 2025 I worked as a technical interviewer at Karat, a company that runs structured interviews on behalf of tech companies. I started as an interviewer and progressed to senior interviewer. Along the way I took on additional roles: reviewing interview content, onboarding new interviewers, and participating in the Brilliant Black Minds programme to help underrepresented engineers land jobs.

700+ interviews across companies, tech stacks, and seniority levels gave me something most people don't get: a cross-section of what good engineers look like and what patterns predict problems. When I advise a founder on hiring or evaluate their team's work, that's where the pattern recognition comes from.

2013–2015

From project manager to senior PM

In 2013 I moved into project management. By 2014 I was a senior tech PM at a different company.

These roles sat between business stakeholders and development teams. The job was translating priorities, protecting scope, and making sure the right things got built in the right order. A lot of what I do now as a fractional CTO started here.

This overlapped with my photography and teaching work below. I was winding one down while building the other up.

2012–2014

Photography, teaching, and a deliberate detour

I took a break from full-time development and ran a teaching business with a co-founder. I also taught LAMP at an HR agency to upskill their candidates.

Not the obvious move for a developer. But running a small business, teaching non-technical people, and handling the commercial side gave me a different view of how small teams work and where they struggle.

2010–2012

Real money, real pressure

I worked at Playtech as a backend application specialist and third-level oncall support. Playtech builds the software behind online casinos, poker rooms, sports betting, and live dealer games. The systems handled real money transactions every second. When something broke at 2am, I was the one who picked up.

That job taught me what it feels like when downtime has a price tag. It shaped how I think about risk, reliability, and the trade-offs you make when "move fast" meets "don't lose people's money."

2002–2010

Early career

I started working professionally as a junior web developer in 2002.

I'd been writing code since 1994, studied Informatics at university, and left one exam short of the degree because work had already taken over.

Over eight years I moved from junior to mid to senior developer, mostly on the LAMP stack, across several companies. Those years were about learning how production systems actually work: databases, servers, deployments, and the things that break at the worst time.

I also tried starting an agency with three friends in 2006. We couldn't make it sustainable, but there were plenty of lessons in it.

Teaching & community

Teaching has been a thread through my whole career

Conference. Spoke at Bulgaria's first WebTech conference about PHP PEAR (2005).
Community. Created and led Microstock BG, a community of microstock photography contributors in Bulgaria. Around 2,500 members at its peak. I ran the forums, organised offline events, and hosted speakers. I kept it useful and non-toxic. Active from 2007 to 2014.
University. Assistant in a web development course for one year (2008).
School. Co-founded a small school teaching photography and web development with PHP (2012–2014).
Corporate training. Taught PHP at an HR agency to upskill their candidates (2013).

None of this was about building a personal brand. I like explaining things, running communities, and helping people get better. That turns out to be a big part of fractional CTO work too.

Things I built

I still build

Most of my work has been on other people's products. Still, over the years I've built a few things of my own.

Trello Improvements Extension

2015

I was working as a senior PM and got frustrated with what Trello couldn't do. So I built a browser extension to fix it. It's still live with roughly 1,200 active installs across Chrome and Firefox.

ProjectRecap

projectrecap.com

Analyses git history to surface delivery patterns and risks. I'm running it as a 90-day experiment to see whether there's real demand for it.

StepSprite

stepsprite.com

A hardware step tracker for walking pad users. Custom firmware, custom app, manufactured hardware. New territory for me, and that's part of the appeal.

Open source

Ongoing

Small contributions to WordPress over the years: core patches, a plugin, translations. Nothing headline-worthy, but consistent.

The full picture

Junior developer Senior developer Backend specialist Oncall support Photographer Teacher Project manager Senior PM Agency founder (failed) Remote contractor Browser extension builder Open source contributor Community leader Technical interviewer Fractional CTO

Twenty-three years. Developer, specialist, oncall, PM, teacher, community builder, photographer, failed agency founder, remote contractor, technical interviewer, fractional CTO. Not a straight line, but every role gave me a different view of how software gets built and where things go wrong.

Let's talk

If you want someone who has seen software from several angles, tell me about the team and the product. I'll tell you quickly whether I can help.

Get in touch

Based in Bulgaria, EU. EET timezone.