Hello and welcome to my personal home on the web!
My name is Georgi Zhivankin, I am 31 years old and I was born in Sofia City, Bulgaria. This is my tiny web corner where I aim to showcase my portfolio and skills, as well as post my thoughts on various things ranging from deeply philosophical or professional, through pretty trivial, to even mundane thoughts, experiences and every-day events in the blog section of the website.
Below is a brief summary of my education, career and some information about my general life interests, but if you are interested mainly in my portfolio, please head directly to the dedicated portfolio page, where more detailed information is available.
Location and Work
As of March 2019, I am living in Manhattan, New York City, after having lived in Berlin in Germany (for over 3 years) and London in the United Kingdom (for around 7 years). Before that, I have lived exclusively in my beloved hometown of Sofia, Bulgaria, where I still visit occasionally in order to keep in touch with my family.
I work in the IT industry, and more specifically as a back-end developer, creating all sorts of websites and web applications, but more on that in the Career and Work Experience section below.
Education
In autumn 2012, I graduated with a 1st class degree in BSC Business Computing Systems (HONS) from the British City, University of London. The focus of the degree was mainly in Computer Science, but as it was a multifaceted degree, I was taught a few business-related modules as well.
Before undertaking my undergraduate degree, I finished my secondary education at First English Language School in my native Sofia, which primarily specialises in extensive English language education.
Career and Work Experience
Since an early age, I have been spending my time exploring the world of information technologies and high-tech gadgets. As a result, as of 2007, I started taking various freelance jobs on the Internet. I subsequently taught myself to program in PHP and made it my full-time job in my second year at University.
As part of my undergraduate degree, I completed a one year placement as an e-learning Moodle platform developer at the National Autistic Society where my main responsibilities were to maintain a Moodle powered web-portal used by the society’s schools for autistic children.
Between March 2012 and September 2014, I worked as a web developer / PHP Programmer for the Zurich-based RepRisk AG where my main responsibilities were to code and maintain the world-famous RepRisk® Tool, to provide IT support to existing and new clients (if required) and to help my colleagues in any other IT-related tasks.
Between May 2015 and September 2015, I was a PHP developer for a small London-based digital agency called Mettle, which specialises in consultancy and development of Laravel-based web applications. There I worked on various products for the agency’s clients,
ranging from small websites to highly complex business applications.
At the moment, I am working as a back-end developer for the world-famous IT team of HelloFresh, where I first worked as part of the Global API team, which was tasked with supporting and enhancing the core API that powers a variety of internal and external HelloFresh applications and services. After a year working on the core API, I moved into a squad part of one of the consumer-facing tribes, where we built a dedicated microservice that takes care of all of the products which you can order online, then I moved to the SCM tribe where I worked on a variety of logistics microservices, and now I am part of the team in New York that primarily supports the US side of the business.
I am always looking for new opportunities where I can keep on growing my career and experience, meet new and interesting people and last but not least, have fun while doing so, therefore, if you have an interesting project in mind, feel free to get in touch.
Interests, Hobbies and Fascinations
In addition to high tech, I am interested in a variety of other fields. For example, I am an avid electronic dance music fan, who in my early and late teen years, attended numerous club parties and concerts.
In my spare time, I love reading Science Fiction books and newspapers and magazines focused on the business and the economy.
When chilling out with friends, I love long nightly walks around the city, engaging conversations and having drinks in quiet bars or cafes.