Hi, I'm
Lev Pickovsky
INTRODUCTION
About Me
I'm a software engineer with extensive experience in the industry and a science and technology geek with a relentless craving for knowledge. For a brief introduction to my background, you can check out the introductory video. The rest of this page provides more details about me, my work and my interests in my professional and personal life.
Thank you for your interest and happy viewing 🙂
Introductory Video
* Video download size: ~10MB
AT WORK
Throughout my career, I've had the pleasure to learn and get hands-on experience with a variety of what the software development industry has to offer, to work in different environments and teams, and to mentor and lead many of my colleagues to successful outcomes. This allowed me to hone my technical, collaborative, leadership and organizational skills. I've mostly worked on designing and developing backend system components, while being involved in the full development lifecycle from requirements gathering through implementation and testing to delivery and maintenance, but I've always been highly involved in system infrastructure as well, fully administering it at times (and I've also done some frontend work). Below are the highlights of my personality, skills and experience.
Skills & Personal Traits
- I have a broad and diverse spectrum of interests and experience, spanning everything from the hardware and OS-level infrastructure through high level programming languages and frameworks to large scale distributed system architecture. I'm able to design, debug and optimize solutions throughout the different levels of this stack.
- I'm very autodidactic and I usually acquire and apply new knowledge very quickly.
- I'm very collaborative and highly experienced in working with different teams and stakeholders as well as providing mentroship to my teammates and leading technical aspects of development.
- I always work hard to achieve expertise in the things that I work on, learn as much as I can from others and share my own knowledge whenever I can.
- I'm very open-minded with regard to different ideas, technology and working methodologies. I always bear in mind that complex problems invite a variety of possible solutions.
- I always strive for clear and effective communication, which I consider to be a foundation of successful teamwork.
- I'm self-motivated and highly dedicated to my work.
Technical Knowledge & Experience
- A variety of programming languages and runtime environments: statically and dynamically typed, imperative and functional, compiled and interpreted, native and VM execution, multithreaded, event loop and message passing execution models, etc. This includes: Java, C & C++, Ruby, JavaScript, Python, Scala, Elixir and more.
- Lower-level mechanisms and APIs: process and thread management, concurrency (e.g. mutual exclusion and memory visibility), IPC (e.g. Sockets, Pipes, FIFOs, and memory mapping), and networking (e.g. the network stack, IP routing, DNS, TLS certificates, NAT, and tunneling).
- Data storage and processing: relational databases (e.g. MySQL), various NoSQL databases (e.g. Cassandra, Elasticsearch, MongoDB, Redis, DynamoDB, and Aerospike), and some big data processing systems (e.g. Hadoop + Hive, S3 and Parquet-based data lakes, Spark on AWS EMR, and Redshift).
- Process communication: RESTful web APIs, message queues (e.g. RabbitMQ and AWS SQS), event streaming using Kafka, and Pub/Sub.
- Docker container-based virtualization.
- Designing large scale and high throughput distributed systems while handling aspects such as load balancing, fault tolerance, automatic scaling, monitoring, etc.
- Cloud computing using the large array of virtual infrastructure and managed services provided by AWS.
- Some frontend web development using the React framework.
OFF WORK
I've been fascinated with science and technology for as long as I can remember due to my curious and pragmatic nature. I like analyzing and understanding how everything around me works as well as solving problems and puzzles. Following astronomy news and reading articles about electronics, quantum mechanics, medicine, etc. is an everyday part of my life. When I find the time, I love creating both fun and/or useful software projects and physical items. I have a little electronics lab at home, which also houses my 3D printer, and I love learning from the invaluable source of information which is the wonderful international DIY/Maker community. I also love fixing our own household devices as much as my skills permit. Below are some of the little projects that I've worked on just for fun or for their utility.
CONTACT
Thank you for taking the time to view my profile page. Please feel free to contact me whichever way you find convenient.