Marcin Kurczewski

Freelance Python/JS developer

Career highlights

STX Next (4.3 years)
- Javascript
- Django Rest Framework
- Docker
- C#
- GitHub
- OAuth
- OpenLDAP
- Angular
- Python
- HTML
- React
- CI
- Redis
- GraphQL Apollo
- GraphQL
- Postgres
- Python 3
- git
- Jenkins
- Django
Motoinsight (4.0 years)
- JQuery
- Javascript
- Docker
- Django Rest Framework
- VueJS
- GitHub
- Celery
- Python
- HTML
- LogDNA
- CI
- Travis
- Squash
- Postgres
- Python 3
- git
- Python 2
- Django
- Sentry
Toptal (1.6 year)
- Crispy Forms
- Aptible
- Calendly
- Django Rest Framework
- Docker
- Bootstrap
- GitHub
- Celery
- Python
- React
- CI
- GitHub Actions
- DigitalOcean
- Postgres
- Python 3
- git
- HelloSign
- Django
- CheckR
- Stripe
- Sentry

Skills

Location

Poznań, Poland

Employment

Freelance senior backend engineer Glopal 2023-09-01 Present
I planned and managed a project for automatic website translation.
Technologies:
- CI
- Typescript
- Node.js
- GitLab
- Google Cloud Platform
- Amazon AWS
- Postgres
- Python
- Python 3
- git
Freelance software developer PostMedia 2022-06-14 Present
I was hired to implement a working integration with the Google News Showcase under very high time constraints. I completed that goal and later on my position transformed into general maintenance of the news feeds integrations.
Technologies:
- CI
- Apple News
- Atom
- Django
- Docker
- GitHub
- Google Cloud Platform
- Google News
- Google News Showcase
- Postgres
- Python
- Python 3
- RSS
- git
Senior freelance Python developer Toptal 2022-02-01 2023-08-31
- I developed from scratch a new product in the surrogacy space for matching gestational donors and intended parents.
- I integrated the platform with many third party screening tools.
- I created Stripe-based billing system.
- After the intensive MVP development phase, I and my team focused on refactoring the system into an API and SPA and its further development for organizational clients.
Technologies:
- Aptible
- Bootstrap
- CI
- Calendly
- Celery
- CheckR
- Crispy Forms
- DigitalOcean
- Django
- Django Rest Framework
- Docker
- GitHub
- GitHub Actions
- HelloSign
- Postgres
- Python
- Python 3
- React
- Sentry
- Stripe
- git
Senior full-stack engineer Motoinsight 2020-09-01 2023-04-26
- I worked on a company-wide transformation to services architecture.
- I heavily optimized principal areas of several products.
- I shaped code architecture.
- I triaged production issues.
- I held interviews for new candidates.
Technologies:
- CI
- Celery
- Django
- Django Rest Framework
- Docker
- GitHub
- HTML
- Javascript
- LogDNA
- Postgres
- Python
- Python 3
- Sentry
- Squash
- Travis
- VueJS
- git
Freelance software engineer Netguru 2022-04-01 2022-07-31
- I developed a greenfield project relating to technical budget analysis.
Technologies:
- CI
- Celery
- Django
- Django Rest Framework
- Docker
- GitHub
- GitHub Actions
- Google Cloud Platform
- Postgres
- Python
- Python 3
- git
Senior+ freelance Python developer STX Next 2022-04-18 2022-07-15
- I worked under a team extension contract for a client in the healthcare segment.
- I maintained and developed new features in one of the microservices.
Technologies:
- CI
- Django
- Django Rest Framework
- Docker
- GitHub
- GraphQL
- GraphQL Apollo
- HTML
- Postgres
- Python
- Python 3
- git
Freelance software engineer Netguru 2021-12-01 2022-03-31
- I migrated Google APIs from v7 to v9 in an elaborate inhouse product for a food delivery company working in over 30 countries.
- I advocated good practices in each project (code reviews, linters etc.)
- I led Dockerization efforts in three projects.
Technologies:
- CI
- Docker
- GitHub
- Google Cloud Platform
- Okta
- Python
- Python 2
- Python 3
- Travis
- git
Freelance software engineer Netguru 2021-10-01 2021-11-30
- I launched a new service for coordinating inventory in a big Polish retail chain.
Technologies:
- CI
- Django
- GitHub
- Python
- Python 3
- git
Senior+ software engineer STX Next 2021-01-01 2021-08-31
- I worked as a solo maintainer of numerous short-lived Python projects for various customers after the previous project had ended.
- I held interviews for new candidates.
Full-stack engineer Bridgemaker 2020-08-01 2021-02-14
- I built a backend for a project for coordinating car fleets in Germany from scratch, and maintained it during the product launch.
- I developed a live tracking of fleet vehicles on a map widget (to the extent permissible by German law.)
Technologies:
- CI
- Django
- Docker
- GitLab
- GraphQL
- Graphene
- MongoDB
- Postgres
- Python
- Python 3
- Travis
- What3Words
- git
Senior+ technical team lead STX Next 2019-11-01 2021-01-01
- I maintained and held ownership of existing projects for one of the company's oldest clients in the food industry.
- I led a team of 2 to 7 (the size was changing over time according to the client's budget).
- I led talks with the client.
- I conducted a complex migration project to shift away from an LDAP database to a relational database, which fundamentally involved the entirety of the client's products portfolio.
Technologies:
- Angular
- CI
- Django
- Django Rest Framework
- Docker
- GitHub
- HTML
- Javascript
- Jenkins
- OAuth
- OpenLDAP
- Postgres
- Python
- Python 3
- React
- Redis
- git
Team lead Motoinsight 2020-04-01 2020-09-01
- I led a team of four people to continuously maintain a multitude of projects.
- I coordinated work between Delivery, Product and Q&A teams.
- I did code reviews for the team.
- I worked with the code and created tickets.
- I solved architectural problems.
- I kept track of the team OKRs.
An experiment after our previous team lead has left to see if I would like a career in more of a managerial role. I found out that I prefer a role that's "closer to the keyboard". After the company has secured a stronger management layer, I decided to go back to coding.
Full-stack engineer Motoinsight 2019-05-01 2020-03-31
- I maintained five existing projects, delivered new features.
- I held complete code ownership of one of the projects.
- I achieved a bug-free backlog in another project.
- I had best code review presence in the entire company based by the number of the comments and response speed.
Technologies:
- CI
- Celery
- Django
- Docker
- GitHub
- HTML
- JQuery
- Javascript
- LogDNA
- Postgres
- Python
- Python 2
- Python 3
- Squash
- Travis
- VueJS
- git
Full-stack engineer Qualio 2019-10-01 2020-03-27
- I maintained an existing project.
- I launched a new major product feature.
- I improved software development process across the board – advocated code linters, code reviews and improvements to CI.
- I introduced Docker.
Technologies:
- CI
- Docker
- Elasticsearch
- GitLab
- HTML
- Javascript
- Postgres
- Pyramid
- Python
- Python 3
- SQL
- SQLAlchemy
- git
Senior full-stack engineer STX Next 2019-04-01 2019-10-31
- I maintained and held ownership of existing projects for one of the company's oldest clients in the food industry.
- I led talks with the client.
Technologies:
- CI
- Django
- Django Rest Framework
- Docker
- GitHub
- HTML
- Javascript
- Jenkins
- OAuth
- OpenLDAP
- Postgres
- Python
- Python 3
- Redis
- git
Regular+ full-stack engineer STX Next 2018-04-01 2019-03-31
- I maintained existing projects for one of the company's oldest clients in the food industry.
- I ported the codebase from Python 2 to Python 3.
- I introduced Docker.
Technologies:
- Angular
- C#
- Django
- Django Rest Framework
- Docker
- GitHub
- HTML
- Javascript
- Jenkins
- OAuth
- OpenLDAP
- Postgres
- Python
- Python 3
- React
- Redis
- git
Software engineer BAE Systems Applied Intelligence 2018-02-01 2018-03-15
- A brief role as a C# software engineer on a network surveillance toolkit. Quick and mannerly termination because of misaligned expectations on both sides.
Technologies:
- C#
Software developer Capgemini Polska sp. z o.o. 2017-05-01 2018-01-31
- I maintained the company's internal software written in C#.
- I briefly worked as a Guidewire/Gosu developer for a large German insurance company.
I was benched most of the time because of restructuring at the company, which eventually prompted me to look for something else.
Technologies:
- C#
- Gosu
- Guidewire
- HTML
- JQuery
- Javascript
C#/.NET developer Forcom sp. z o.o. 2013-01-01 2017-04-30
- I maintained and developed new features for back office desktop client.
- I maintained and developed new features for a central system that communicated with back offices across the entire retail chain.
Technologies:
- C#
- CI
- Cassandra
- Mercurial
- NHibernate
- Oracle
- Postgres
- Python
- Python 2
- Spring.NET
- TeamCity
- WPF
- git
PHP developer Gammanet sp. z o.o. 2012-03-01 2013-02-28
- I worked on various education themed web apps.
- I built from scratch and launched a tool to synchronize Google Domain groups.
Technologies:
- CSS
- Google APIs
- HTML
- Javascript
- PHP
- Zend
- svn

Education

Master's Degree at University of Adam Mickiewicz Department of Mathematics and Computer Science 2012-10-01 2014-06-01
Thesis: Attacks on cryptographic hash functions
Bachelor's Degree at University of Adam Mickiewicz Department of Mathematics and Computer Science 2009-10-01 2012-06-01

Open source

TRCustoms 2022-10-01 2022-03-30
- https://trcustoms.org/
- https://github.com/rr-/trcustoms/
A community portal that hosts custom fan-made levels for the classic Tomb Raider games (there's over 3000 of them at the time of writing this!). Features tagging, a thoughtful review system, custom themes and more. The files are hosted in the cloud.
Technologies:
- Amazon S3
- CI
- Celery
- Django
- Django Rest Framework
- Docker
- GitHub
- GitHub Actions
- HTML
- Javascript
- Pillow
- Postgres
- Python
- Python 3
- React
- git
CRC manipulator 2021-01-28 Present
A utility that lets you manipulate CRC32 (and few CRC16) checksums of your files by appending a few special bytes at the end. The motivation for this project is largely in the anime fansubbing scene – releases there often have checksums in their names, and this tool was created to let the groups change these checksums into any numbers they wish to, which allowed them to do new kind of memeing.
Technologies:
- C
- PyQT5
- Python
- Python 3
Tomb Raider I: Community Edition 2021-01-01 Present
- https://github.com/rr-/Tomb1Main
An open source implementation of Tomb Raider I (1996). Made by complete reverse engineering the TombATI / GLRage variant of the original game and replacing all proprietary audio/video libraries with open source variants, all of which was solo work. It also adds a lot of new features to the game, such as enemy healthbars or fly cheat, and fixes many of the original game bugs. Nowadays maintained by a community of testers and programmers from all around the world.
Technologies:
- ATI3DCIF
- C
- DirectX
- OpenGL
- Reverse engineering
- SDL
- WinAPI
- WinMM
- ffmpeg
Progress Quest: the CLI edition 2018-11-01 2021-12-20
- https://github.com/rr-/pq-cli
- http://progressquest.com/
I've ported Progress Quest, a popular zero-player RPG, to run in a terminal. The gist of the game is that once the player has set up their artificial character, there is no user interaction at all; the game “plays” itself, with the human player as spectator. This has led me to think that rather than a web-browser, the ideal environment for such a game is a text console, so that the game can be easily run on servers and thus have very long uptimes.
Technologies:
- Python
- Python 3
- curses
- urwid
docstring parser 2018-04-17 Present
- https://github.com/rr-/docstring_parser
A library to parse various flavors of Python docstrings into strongly typed classes. Offers serialization back to a string form as well. PyPI deems it as critical to the Python ecosystem which I find flattering.
Technologies:
- Python
- Python 3
bubblesub 2017-07-22 2021-12-31
- https://github.com/rr-/bubblesub
Since aegisub, “the” program for anime subtitles, didn't actually fit my needs, I ended up creating my own subtitle editor that works with ASS/SSA subtitles. It features video preview, spectrogram, video band, frame synchronization, playback tempo control with pitch correction and advanced plugin system.
Technologies:
- FFMS2
- FFTW
- GitHub
- GitHub Actions
- Pillow
- PyQT5
- Python
- Python 3
- git
- mpv
- numpy
szurubooru 2016-03-19 2018-02-10
- https://github.com/rr-/szurubooru
A web gallery with users and a robust permission system. Supports tagging, tag suggestions and implications, videos, sticky annotations, detecting visually similar images, rating, favoriting, rich search system, solid API and more. Although I don't use it myself anymore, I managed to build a strong enough community around this project that it now lives on, maintained by its community. At that time, I didn't use any particular framework and went with an inhouse solution for both the frontend and the backend, but from the perspective of time I would probably go with Django and React.
Technologies:
- Elasticsearch
- Javascript
- Pillow
- Python
- Python 3
DRM and TCT video frontends for mpv 2015-04-15 2015-06-17
- https://github.com/mpv-player/mpv
At some point my notebook hard-drive was broken and I had to boot it from a USB stick. To save resources, I didn't use X and instead booted straight into Linux console. This notebook, however, was primarily used to play anime, and at the time the video player of my choice, mpv, required X or Wayland server to be running. So I coded two video outputs for it: DRM (that lets you play videos on Linux systems without having to run X server) and TCT (that lets you play media in your terminal with much better fidelity than libcaca).
Technologies:
- C
- GitHub
- OpenGL
- git
- mpv
IDA image preview plugin 2015-03-16 2020-11-07
- https://github.com/rr-/ida-images
A plugin for the IDA disassembler that lets you view and interpret program memory as an uncompressed graphical bitmap. Supports a few image modes, such as RGB-888, BGR-565 and so on.
Technologies:
- PyQT4
- PyQT5
- PySide
- Python
- Python 3
arc_unpacker 2014-11-30 2017-11-06
- https://github.com/vn-tools/arc_unpacker
A huge data mining tool that extracts media from various Japanese games of the visual novel genre; supports over 450 games. Over time, the project became very popular, which was reflected in the ever-increasing demand from the community to support new games. At the same time, the high technical skills needed to analyze and reverse the algorithms used in these games meant that there was no one there to help. Eventually I ceased to enjoy working on it and decided to abandon it.
Technologies:
- C
- C++
- Reverse engineering
- git
MALgraph 2013-07-05 2015-05-02
- https://github.com/rr-/malgraph4
- https://myanimelist.net
A statistics service for MyAnimeList users that let you show, among other things, the distribution of your ratings, what decades you like the most, anime recommendations and even achievements. Co-developed with this guy. Once very popular (many users posted a badge of their rating distribution on their profiles), abandoned after MyAnimeList shut down their APIs.
Technologies:
- Apache
- CSS
- HTML
- JQuery
- Javascript
- PHP
- SQLite