Roman Shmelev / Developer story

Overview

I'm backend sofware engineer with 18 years of commercial experience.
My main area of expertise is designing and building high-load streaming media solutions.
My primary programming languages are Typescript, Java and Go, though I have experience with several others.

Achievements

Among the names I can mention, I was the streaming core developer for the megogo.net. According to Wikipedia, Megogo is the largest entertainment service in Eastern Europe with over 55 million users and a catalog of about 200,000 hours of content, and streams of over 4000 local and foreign TV channels.

I've participated in multiple projects involving hundreds of servers running worldwide, supporting 100,000+ concurrent users (VOD/live).

As an authorized Wowza consultant, I had the opportunity to travel across Europe (France, Luxembourg, Denmark, Finland, and more) helping numerous companies to build their own streaming solutions.

In recent years, I’ve been working on a major live streaming project — no further details on that one 🥷.

🙃 one more thing, I adopted and promoted async/await in Node.js before it became mainstream

Languages

I started programming when I was 11 y.o.

11 y.o → BASIC → Assembly

...then after Windows PC was bought:

→ Pascal → Delphi → C →

...then learned more languages while working at a CDN/VDN company:

→ C++ → C# → Perl/regex! → HTML/JS → CSS → ActionScript → Java → PHP →

...and expanded further after becoming an independent consultant and building my own programming school:

→ Golang → Typescript → Rust → (currently happy with Typescript)

In parallel I had fun exploring:

→ Android Java → Python → Haskell🔥 → Purescript → maybe Zig?..

Streaming engineer skills

Protocols/codecs/containers: RTMP, RTSP, HLS, SRT, MPEG-DASH, WebRTC, MP4, FLV, TS, H.264, H.265/HEVC, AAC, CBR, VBR
Apps/services/libs/whatever: Ffmpeg, Gstreamer, Wowza, Nimble, Nginx, Apache, AWS, Akamai, Cloudflare, Limelight, HAProxy, Wirecast, OBS, vMix, Mistserver, Red5, DRM, OTT, VideoJS
Worked on:
- Rebroadcasting streams globally
- Timelapse generator service
- CDN autoscaler
- High-load caching proxy media server
- Video merging controller for real-time chats
- Building whole CDN/VDN for a telecom company
- Security modules: PPM, DLP, GeoIP
- Transcoding clusters
- Integrations with third-party streaming platforms
- On-the-fly replacement of a streaming core in a live high-load, multi-device environment
- Real-time stats and monhtly reports generator from logs
- Integration with external CDNs
- Beta-testing AWS 😎 (yes, it was that long ago)
- Enabling compatibility with numerous video sources and sinks
- Customized video players
- Dynamic video overlays

My recommendations

Patrick Lencioni - The Five Dysfunctions of a Team: Great book to build teams and be in a team. Also, I recommend The Advantage: Why Organizational Health Trumps Everything Else In Business from the same author.
CS106A Stanford Course: I've adopted it for my school!
Advent of Code: An advent calendar of small programming puzzles to solve in any language you like (my solutions on GitHub)
untrustedgame.com: A fun way to learn JavaScript
Obsidian: The best app for note-taking and journaling
Cloudflare Workers: A serverless platform I absolutely love
typia.io: One-line type validation for TypeScript