Hello, stranger 👋

My name is Ivan Lesar

I'm a backend software engineer with a masters degree in mathematics and computing from the Faculty of Science in Zagreb, Croatia. Currently I'm working as a backend engineer in Superology.

My free time is spent traveling with my wife and daughter, learing, woodworking, soldering, making our home smarter, and generally spending time in my workshop.

When I'm not tinkering with all kinds of materials, I'm reading about the human brain and its mysterious ways.

Wanna ask me something?

My memories

1. First contact

   I don't even know which year was it. The only thing I remember was the Easter morning and our dad giving us the Commodore64 machine. The keyboard, the cassette player and a small screwdriwer. Say hello to a kid with a new spark and a whole lot of ideas.

2. DOS ether

   Blackness. But things started to make more sense. Interaction was easier.

3. 3.11

   Booting up a graphical user interface. The mouse. I remember writing stories about my day in Microsoft Word and just exiting without saving them.

4. Hello World

   Opening up Netscape default AOL pages opens up. I remember not knowing what I was looking at.

5. Multimedia

   With a curiosity, computers were endless learing machines. Adobe Photoshop and the Macromedia Flash and Dreamweaver were my goto programs when I booted up the PC.

6. The gamechanger

   It was the end of the 5th grade. My school announced that it will be starting a informatics class as an extracuricular subject, and that it would involve programming. Guess who boarded that flight.

7. Break and repair

   The last two years of primary school I learned programming in Q basic, and taught myself to break computers, repair them.

8. Don't consume. Create

   While learing programming in Pascal, the high school times which I remember were more focused on self learing HTML, CSS and starting to boost my Flash skillset which evolved into 3D websites and full length cartoons.

9. Math addiction

   I entered the Faculty of Science, department of mathematics, where I spent years working around several technologies and concepts like several operating systems, programming languages, databases, algorithms, data structures,...

10. A natural ocurrence

    As my pre-teen years were filled by graphic designer software, the natural path which my mind took is to start creating richer user interfaces. Thus, my love for JavaScript was born.

11. Something is on/off

    Now I had the joy of building software, my web frontend skillset grew. But I missed matter. I wanted physical buttons. Who would have known, but around that time, Arduino was born and we became best friends. Nothing can replace that sweet feeling of burning my first board.

12. My path

    Designing and developing the GUI was fun, but it always lacked one thing for me. The brain. My college mentor mentioned a new technology which was written in a language which I already knew, and asked me if I wanted to write my masters thesis in it. As I love challenges, it was time to introduce myself to NodeJS. Little did I know what I was getting myself into. This was the point where I knew that I wanted to professionally grow as a backend engineer.

13. Scaling

    Since I spent much of my lifetime around computers, programming languages and challenges, the next couple of years I focused on learing theory around scaling my projects and writing maintainable code and putting it into practice.

14. A machine can do it

    I was always disgusted by manual work with something which can clearly be done by a machine. While buying components to automate my home, I started using my knowledge of technology to develop automated systems which integrate into my daily routine. And for the sake of completeness, writing began.

15. Functional approach

    Currently I'm working on a microservice-based product at a great scale, fully written in a functional programming language, called Elixir.

16. ...

    As a kid I wondered if my love for technology was ever going to fade away or, at least, loosen a bit. As I can see, the climb is steep and I cannot wait for new and exciting challenges which wait for me ahead.