Currently involved in:

Popular repositories

My Gatsby blog - https://github.com/jumpalottahigh/blog.georgi-yanev.com

My Home Assistant smart home configuration - https://github.com/jumpalottahigh/YAR-Home-Assistant-Configuration

A Java MOOC I did 4 years ago - https://github.com/jumpalottahigh/JavaChallenge-MOOC-course

My Vue Press starter - https://github.com/jumpalottahigh/vuepress-starter

My talks repository (slides) - https://github.com/jumpalottahigh/talks

Short bio

I’m Georgi, 33 year old, european citizen, born in Bulgaria.

So far in my life I have lived in Bulgaria, Cyprus, the USA and for the past 6 years in Finland.

I have a Finnish Swedish spouse that I met in Cyprus 6 years ago and she is the reason I came here.

We have a 3 year old son together.

I love programming, web development, and performant web pages.

One of my biggest passions is buiding high quality web experiences, that load fast, work seamlessly, are interactive quick and work even on older devices.

I like my job, because I have been able to make an impact not only by contributing but also by coming up with and implementing ideas of my own.

I love JavaScript and React!

Long version

https://blog.georgi-yanev.com/learning/how-i-got-into-software-development/

Motivators

  • Being in a team that cares and strives to be the best version of themselves
  • Manager that enables and helps you grow
  • Responsibilities, achievements and rewards
  • Team and company wide knowledge sharing and excitement towards latest trends
  • Someone to talk about Google.io with

Some examples of work done

Personal projects

JAMstack projects:

Work:

  • Revamp and migrate to modern tech stack - using Gatsby (React) and Netlify
  • Developing components in AEM - HTL, Sightly
  • Solving problems and enabling stakeholders, in-house tooling (python crawler, link checker, campaign catalog and many, many more.)
  • SiteCreator - static site generator based on Handlebars and Grunt
  • Setting up A/B tests
  • Working with legacy codebase - jQuery, Bootstrap 3, components

Feedback

„Technically very competent fellow who can adapt any technology or framework very fast“

„Supporting other fellows and has done so in many occations during the AEM project“

„Excellent in written communication using tools like Jira, Teams, Slack and Trello“

„Very good in sharing ideas and resources among team members“

„Always challenging the status quo“

„Of all the developers here, Georgi is most up to the date on latest best practices in web development as far as I see. That is pushing us to be better every day. I would assume that this is due to his genuine interest in the subject. That is the only thing that will keep one up to date in a fast moving industry such as web development.“

„Deep knowledge and always up-to-date with the latest technology“

References

Before web dev

I was born and raised in Bulgaria, where I finished high school with extensive education in Information Technology and English language in the class of 2004.

I applied to study International Economics Relations and got accepted in second place after passing the exams with high scores. This gave me the opportunity to go to the USA in 2005 and 2006.

While in the states I worked as a bus person (helper in a restaurant), housekeeping, maintenance and other positions not very related to my major, I learned a lot. It was a great chance for me to practice speaking English with native speakers.

I traveled alone and had to deal with numerous challenging situation on my own and that was a great learning opportunity.

* * *

After 2 years working on my degree, I decided to drop it for a number of reasons, many of which have to do with the way Bulgarian education is structured. While it's generally fairly good education, it is tedious, corrupted, teaches sometimes outdated things and not at all practical and quite frankly just didn't resonate with me.

It so happened that after my return from the USA in 2006, I dropped out of University and started a new period in my life. I got my first full time, serious job in Bulgaria - working as a waiter in a 4-star hotel in Plovdiv.

After 6 months I was promoted to a shift manager and had to supervise events, such as weddings, banquets and more. This was a smooth and steady period in which I just relaxed and enjoyed a steady paycheck, no worries, playing games, going out with friends. This went on for 3.5 years during which time I gained a lot of practice managing people, discussing with customers, organizing events and in the end managing a restaurant.

* * *

In 2010 I was done with that lifestyle as I could easily see how I could spend my life like this and not really do anything else. And I wanted to do other things. So, I went to Cyprus. It was hard, but eventually, I overcame the difficulties. The story is an interesting and long one of how I went there without almost any money and not knowing anyone and still made it. So much so that I went back there every summer for 3 years in a row (2010, 2011, 2012).

The bottom line is that at the end of the day, Cyprus was a change, somewhat turmoiling time, but a change for the better as it lead me to meet my partner.

Eventually, we got together with her and we moved to live in different places. From summers in Cyprus to winters in Bulgarian ski resorts to eventually moving to Finland.

Here I worked as a person that picks up glasses and stocks the bar in a night club. I didn't like it but it was a means to an end and provided some income. I applied and got accepeted to study for a Bachelor of Engineering in Metropolia Helsinki University of Applied Sciences. The degree was Information Technology and the major was Software Engineering. I was very happy and excited about it and despite having to work the bar job in the meantime, managed to put in a lot of extra effort and time into my degree studies.

Eventually, after working while studying for 2 years I could finally drop the bar job as I was gearing up to apply for my first software developer job. During those 2 years, I had completed the better part of my degree and in the end graduated 1 year ahead of schedule, got my first web development job and had a new member of our family - our son.

* * *

Which brings us to almost nowadays and the past 3-4 years, where I've been focusing on getting better at building things on the web. Both at work and in my free time. I'm still fairly excited and love building applications and solving real problems.

I picked up a few hobbies along the way. For instance, flying FPV drones, smart home automation. Both have a lot to do with embedded engineering and dealing with small sensors, boards, soldering, and configuration. Fun!

I also maintain a blog that is read by ~ 2000 people monthly and I love being able to share knowledge from experiences, which is what my articles do. This desire and skill manifests also in another way - I give workshops (Gatsby, React, ES6) at work and shorter educational session. On top of it all, I also stream live coding on Twitch and I upload educational videos on YouTube.

Copyright © 2013-2023 Georgi Yanev.
Dedicated to little Anton ❤️