From first idea to live product.Design, code, payments and launch.
Classic Battleship, online — the first product on my platform. Designed, built and run end to end: interface, game server, payments and infrastructure.
Live 1-on-1. Matches run in real time and survive a dropped connection.
4 bots. From random shots to a probability map.
Elo rating. A quick match with an equal opponent, or a room by link.
Stats. Leaderboard, shot heatmap, match replays.
Premium. Subscription and purchases via Lava.
Multilingual. On desktop and on a phone.
Screens from a local build with test data.
6+ years in the JavaScript ecosystem. You bring an idea or an existing product; I take it through design, code, payments and infrastructure to launch, and stay for support. One engineer for the whole chain: no handoffs, one person answerable for the result.
Process
Every stage ends with something you can open and check, not a status report.
Goals, users, constraints and the smallest version worth launching.
You see A written scope, milestones and an estimate.
Key flows and screens first, then the architecture and the data model.
You see Screens to review and a short architecture note.
Short iterations: frontend, backend, payments, integrations and tests together.
You see A staging version to click through after every iteration.
Production setup — domain, CI/CD, monitoring, alerts and backups — then the release.
You see The product live on your domain, with alerts already wired.
Fixes, improvements and new features, with an eye on metrics and alerts.
You see Regular releases and a clear list of what comes next.
AI coding agents take the routine; contracts, tests and my review decide what ships.
08Editor’s column
Hi, I’m Nick! I’ve been writing code since I was 12. It started with websites for Counter-Strike servers (HTML, CSS, JS, PHP), so headshots have been part of my life for a long time :) From 2016 I was already building Counter-Strike projects to order: roulette and jackpot sites, Steam trade bots, a browser extension with skin prices. Somehow it never stopped.
Now it’s 6+ years of commercial full-stack work, mostly TypeScript, React, Next.js and Node.js with Postgres. I joined my first company in January 2020, before university even started, and then studied at MIREA alongside the job.
Right now I’m at Printify, a big print-on-demand platform, where I work on both the frontend and the APIs. At one point I took a whole B2B ordering product from an idea to production with a small team. That’s the kind of work I like most: you own something end to end and then actually watch people use it. Alongside that I’m an AI full-stack engineer at Toggle, building LLM products: from a self-hosted open-source model on GPUs to RAG and MCP agents.
I’m pretty AI-first in how I work. I use coding agents for most of the code, with my own rules and skills for them, and Jira and Confluence plugged in through MCP. I still review every step myself, because the agent is fast but I’m the one who gets the call when prod breaks :)
For fun I run my own platform, outegro.dev, on a Kubernetes cluster I set up myself. I’m the only DevOps, the on-call and the person who gets paged there. It’s my playground where I try things out before I bring them to work.
I like to keep learning. My favorite way is to take a service I already know well and rewrite it from scratch in something new. Lately that’s been Go and Rust. That’s how my platform’s watchdog got rewritten, and its drawing is in the hobby club below.
10Hobby club
Drawings of things I built and wrote myself, outside the day job. Feel free to try this at home.
Sheet 1
I built my own bike from parts. I love long rides and cycling trips on it.
Sheet 2
From the years I built Counter-Strike projects to order, 2016–2020. A browser extension took item prices from csgolounge.com and market.csgo.com and showed both right on the trading pages.
Diagram
Sheet 3
Every 5 minutes the watchdog makes its rounds of my platform: pods, the node, certificates, backups, Argo CD and HTTP checks, and it sends alerts and a daily digest to Telegram. Production runs the shell version. From the same spec I rewrote it from scratch twice, in Go and in Rust, with a DRY_RUN shadow mode.
Diagram
12Incident report
Tales from production: short notes on what broke on my watch and what was done about it.
Production
A minor Bun release broke next-auth right in production. Rolling back did not help: the old builds had already been overwritten. The bug was reproduced on dev, Bun went back to the previous version, and later the fix landed upstream.
Action taken: versions are now pinned like life depends on it.
id.outegro.dev
On Node 24, SimpleWebAuthn offered the ML-DSA-44 algorithm first. Its signature weighs 3.2 KB, and passkey sign-in broke.
Action taken: passkey registration is pinned to ES256, EdDSA and RS256.
outegro.dev
During a full rollout of all 11 apps the server lost its way out to the internet: load average around 68, image pulls failing. Then it all came back by itself.
Action taken: none, the server caught its breath and went back to work on its own.
Home
A load test ran from home, from one IP, through Cloudflare. Cloudflare started dropping connections, and the home link, about 460 KB/s, filled up completely.
Action taken: load tests now run on the server itself, straight at the origin.
CRM
Messaging webhooks arrived out of order, and a delayed callback overwrote newer CRM state.
Action taken: events got versions and updates became idempotent. A latecomer can’t overwrite anything now.
Checkout
A single slow delivery provider could hang the entire checkout.
Action taken: bounded timeouts, a circuit breaker and controlled retries. A slow carrier now only slows itself down.
14Employment record book
Building to order since 2016, on staff for over 6 years, since January 2020. Every entry comes from my résumé.
2016 – 2020
Counter-Strike roulette and jackpot sites set up to order, Steam trade bots and skin-trading tools.
Commended for:
Source: résumé
01.2020 – 01.2021
Customer-facing service pages, technical knowledge tools and business integrations.
Source: résumé
01.2021 – 02.2022
E-commerce logistics and fulfillment platform for Latin America.
Commended for:
Source: résumé
02.2022 – 02.2023
Global CRM platform for small and midsize businesses.
Commended for:
Source: résumé
03.2023 – present
Print-on-demand e-commerce platform, 1M+ monthly users platform-wide.
Commended for:
Source: résumé
04.2025 – present
Applied LLM products, agentic workflows and GPU inference.
Commended for:
Source: résumé
16Contact
Tell me what you want to build or fix — a few lines are enough. Open to projects, long-term contracts and ambitious teams.
Coupon
A free 30-minute call
Valid for the bearer: we’ll go through the task, the timeline and the cost. No strings attached.
