Nik Spyratos

Work with me

Summary

Who am I?

I'm Nik. Greek and South African born, currently living in South Africa. I've been building business-oriented web apps for almost a decade.

I predominantly build web apps, write from time to time, and enjoy the coastal life.

Diverse experience

I've worked in many industries from e-commerce, to fintech, to vehicle auctions and beyond.

I've done this for varying business sizes, from handfuls of staff to 200 person strong scale-ups.

I've worked best in small teams of around 5, but have also worked in 50-person strong engineering departments on websites serving millions of users.

Leadership & community

I'm no stranger to taking the lead when the need arises.

In my career I've led large scale data migrations, working closely with senior developers on the right strategy for the product.

This has been from research, to planning with stakeholders, architecting and building, all the way to live deployment. This of course also includes lots of documentation!

As a freelancer, I've taken the same lead with both new project builds for businesses, as well as rescuing legacy projects with version upgrades and admin panels.

On the community side, I've been involved in the local tech scene with communities like ZATech, and have been an organiser of PHP meetups since 2020. Currently, I organise the Laravel Cape Town meetup.

Technical expertise

Can you tell I'm a Laravel fan?

While Laravel is my main specialty, I have also worked in other technology from time to time. Specifically, JavaScript and Python.

I've dabbled a bit with learning Golang, and next on my list is Ruby. This of course can be motivated further along by the right role 😉

Outside of coding directly, I have worked with "the usual suspects" in infrastructure tooling with AWS, VPSes, provisioning services (Laravel Forge & Ploi) & tools (Ansible, Docker). It's not my specialty, but I can make my way through!

Overall, I prefer simplicity in how I build tech - both for other developers and for users.

International specialist

For readers outside of South Africa, I'm also well-versed in working for companies abroad. In fact, I've even written a guide on how to do so while handling payment and tax obligations - whether using an Employer of Record (Deel/Remote) or not!

What I'm looking for

Currently, I'm looking for a full-time position - either employment or as a contractor (if for a remote company).

I work best in remote/async teams that are results-oriented, highly collaborative and effective with text communication. This can be either small to medium sized startups and scaleups, or agile teams within larger companies.

Ideally, I'm looking for companies that work on their own products instead of agencies. Project diversity is always nice, but so is developing deep knowledge in one area!

Interested? Reach out!

For my full professional history, please see my LinkedIn (linked below).

Will provide CV on request - not leaving a public link open as those are often scraped by spammers.

There are two ways to contact me: