Marcin Kurczewski

Marcin Kurczewski

Freelance Python/JS developer

I'm a seasoned full-stack developer armed with robust experience in scalability, systems security and infrastructure management. With strong communication and collaborative skills, I effectively contribute as a team player and ensure seamless project execution.

Employment history

    • Various freelance projects (September 2023—Present)
  • Nodal (Health, U.S.)
    A platform for connecting pre-screened gestational donors and intended parents.
    • Senior lead Python developer (February 2022—August 2023)
    • I have prototyped from scratch the startup's flagship product based on client's designs.
    • I have integrated the product with many 3rd-party background check services.
    • I have ensured product compliance with the required HIPAA standard.
    • I have developed a Stripe-based customer billing system.
    • My prototype was good enough to help us raise funds and increase the team size from myself only, to 4 full-time developers.
    • After the intensive MVP development phase that has brought in many individuals, my team and I shifted our focus to corporate clients. Our efforts to offer attractive APIs helped us sign a contract with an important hospital.
  • Motoinsight (Automotive/E-commerce, Canada)
    E-commerce platforms for luxury car brands and dealers.
    • Senior full-stack engineer (September 2020—April 2023)
    • Team lead (April 2020—September 2020)
      An interim stand-in for my manager, who went on maternity leave.
    • Full-stack engineer (May 2019—March 2020)
    • I created a preorder Stripe-based platform for a high-profile car model launch, that sold out in under 10 minutes after going live.
    • I maintained a fleet of existing projects and delivered new features.
    • I optimized principal areas of several key products.
    • I held code ownership of a web platform for one of the customer brands.
    • I achieved a bug-free backlog in one of the company's bigger projects.
    • I had best code review presence in the company (based on the number of the comments and response speed).
    • I often acted as "the glue" between Delivery, Product, and Q&A teams.
    • I had substantial influence over the code architecture. I helped in shaping a company-wide transformation to services architecture.
    • I was on the on-call team for real-time production issues.
    • I held interviews with new candidates.
  • Decernis (Food and beverage, U.S.)
    Supply chain management and compliance solutions for American and European food markets.
    • Senior technical team lead (November 2019—January 2021)
    • Senior full-stack engineer (April 2019—October 2019)
    • Regular full-stack engineer (April 2018—March 2019)
    • I maintained several key products, steadily expanding my expertise to eventually become a team lead.
    • As a team lead, I conducted a complex migration project to shift away from a legacy LDAP solution to a relational database, which fundamentally involved the entirety of the client's products portfolio. This endeavor reduced synchronization issues across the board that plagued the previous system, improved the client's relationship with their customers and allowed to implement a _single sign-on_ function.
    • I ported the codebase from Python 2 to Python 3, which improved code maintainability and product performance.
    • I introduced Docker containerization, which eased onboarding and development workflow for new employees.
    • When I was a team lead, the team grew from 2 people to 7.
  • Career change to Python
    The years of experience with Python in non-commercial projects have allowed me to appreciate how rich its package ecosystem is and how quickly one can prototype various solutions with it. These observations eventually led to a natural decision to closely tie my further professional path to this technology.
  • Capgemini Polska sp. z o.o. (Insurance, Poland)
    • C#/.NET software developer (May 2017—February 2018)
  • Forcom sp. z o.o. (Retail, Poland)
    • C#/.NET developer (January 2013—April 2017)
  • Gammanet sp. z o.o. (Education, Poland)
    • Part-time PHP developer (March 2012—February 2013)

Open source projects

  • Tomb Raider I: Community Edition (January 2021—Present)
    An open source rendition of the renowned Tomb Raider I (1996) that revamps gameplay and resolves numerous glitches, all while staying true to the original. This labor of love, predominantly undertaken by me, showcases an extraordinary level of precision and accuracy through complete reverse engineering of the game's code and replacement of proprietary libraries with open source variants. Over time, it transformed from a personal endeavor into a collaborative effort involving an enthusiastic global community of gamers and programmers.
  • TRCustoms (October 2022—March 2023)
    A community portal that hosts custom fan-made levels for the classic Tomb Raider games (there are 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.
  • bubblesub (July 2017—December 2021)
    A subtitle editor that features live video preview, audio spectrograms, frame synchronization, playback tempo control with pitch correction, advanced plugin system and more.
  • arc_unpacker (November 2014—November 2017)
    A big data-mining tool for extracting media from Japanese visual novel games; supports 450+ titles. As the project gained popularity, the demand for supporting new games surged. Regrettably, the excessively challenging entry barrier, necessary for analyzing and reverse engineering game algorithms, deterred any potential support. Consequently, my enthusiasm waned, leading to the ultimate decision to discontinue this endeavor.
  • MALgraph (July 2013—May 2015)

    A service building on top of MyAnimeList, allowing its users to access statistics and taste analysis based on their show ratings. Co-developed with this individual. Despite gaining significant popularity, the service was discontinued when MyAnimeList underwent a change in ownership and decided to terminate their APIs.

Location

Location
Poznań, Poland –   

How I like to work

  • Code maintainability and practicality
  • High team cohesion, good vibes
  • High code ownership, innovation
  • Work from my own equipment
  • Home office model, no travel
  • Asynchronous communication

Skills / Technologies

  • Python 2
  • Python 3
  • Python
  • Django Rest Framework
  • Django
  • Pyramid
  • Flask
  • FastAPI
  • Celery
  • Pillow
  • Swagger
  • C++
  • C
  • Perl
  • PHP
  • Ruby
  • Apache
  • nginx
  • Docker
  • Redis
  • Postgres
  • SQL
  • SQLAlchemy
  • SQLite
  • Oracle
  • Elasticsearch
  • GraphQL Apollo
  • GraphQL
  • Cassandra
  • MongoDB
  • Google Cloud Platform
  • Amazon AWS
  • Amazon DAX
  • Amazon IAM
  • DynamoDB
  • Amazon S3
  • Serverless
  • Javascript
  • Typescript
  • Node.js
  • Bootstrap
  • CSS
  • HTML
  • JQuery
  • Angular
  • VueJS
  • React
  • git
  • svn
  • Mercurial
  • CI/CD
  • TeamCity
  • Travis
  • GitHub
  • GitHub Actions
  • GitLab
  • Squash
  • Jenkins
  • Aptible
  • DigitalOcean
  • Sentry
  • SSH
  • Atom/RSS
  • XML
  • YAML
  • JSON
  • HTTP
  • HTTP/2
  • numpy
  • FFTW
  • urwid
  • PyQT4
  • PyQT5
  • PySide
  • OAuth
  • Apple News
  • Google News
  • Google News Showcase
  • Google APIs
  • Calendly
  • Stripe
  • HelloSign
  • What3Words
  • CheckR
  • Crispy Forms
  • Okta
  • OpenLDAP
  • mpv
  • Reverse engineering
  • WinAPI
  • WinMM
  • ATI3DCIF
  • DirectX
  • OpenGL
  • SDL
  • ffmpeg
  • FFMS2
  • curses

Education

  • University of Adam Mickiewicz
    • Master's degree (October 2012—June 2014)
      Thesis: Attacks on cryptographic hash functions
    • Bachelor's degree (October 2009—June 2012)