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CatHeap Games blog

Tech blog of an old grumpy developer.

Let’s pretend I dug out one of those 1990s “under construction” gifs here.

You can have a look at my CV if you’re into that sort of things, otherwise there will be blog posts linked in the sidebar navigation, and eventually free resources like repos, assets, music, etc.

Non-technical

You can listen to my music on Deezer or Spotify.

Contact

You can send me anonymous questions over at Tetratto.

.1

  1. Site launched on 2025-12-05, last update 2026-07-09. ↩

About me / short Curriculum Vitae

Some middle-aged guy in Europe who mostly worked as “senior developer” and “architect”. Expert on nothing, curious about learning everything.

Currently retooling my skill set towards game development and Rust overall.

Detailed CV might come in later when this site has more than 0.30000000004 pageviews per month.

Why is this CV so informal and anonymous?

I generally prefer not to put my name out publicly. Formal CV on demand.

Quick Timeline

  • 2025-9999 Self-employed / working on my own projects / dealing with health
  • 2015-2025 new betting company startup, first to deliver Kubernetes to production in this country, Node.js, Kafka, etc
  • 2013-2015 old betting company, Python 2, Twisted, infra/tooling/troubleshooting team; DB migration to .NET platform
  • 2008-2012 two PHP jobs, e-commerce
  • 2005-2007 freelance webdev (PHP), later selling hardware / building PCs
  • 2004-2005 Accenture, EAI (Enterprise Application Integration; overpriced cronjobs)
  • 2002-2004 finished high school, non-tech jobs

Short CV

20 years of being a web developer. Started programming in 1989.

From the most recent ones:

  • Rust, Bevy game engine
  • Misc. small Rust learning projects (embedded, controlling a USB device)
  • gave four presentations in the local game developer community (color grading, low level programming, OKLCH, embedded)

Previous workplace (2015-2025):

  • gave presentations about low-level programming and PostgreSQL internals
  • training new employees and interns
  • video editing, tutorials
  • Kafka cluster management, PostgreSQL DBA tasks, optimization, tuning
  • dev env architecture, tooling, helper commands, troubleshooting
  • created a lot of Grafana dashboards, exporting custom Prometheus metrics
  • SRE, alerts, bug hunting, incident response, cathing other people’s errors early
  • Kubernetes and architecture around microservices, deploy scripts, CI/CD
  • Node.js, Express + tooling around those (Grafana, ElasticSearch, etc)

Before 2015:

  • (long time ago) Python, Twisted, Django, Flask, uWSGI
  • (very long time ago) PHP, XML, XSLT, a bit of C# and Flash / ActionScript 3
  • (u64::MAX long ago) BASIC and basics of x86 assembly

What can I do for you?

You can try to hire me, preferably to work in Rust on a part-time, permanent contract basis (~24 hours a week), or as a consultant / contractor (as in, reasonable hourly wage, not $1000 an hour type of consultant).

I’m available to teach, give presentations, make text or video tutorials, write documentation.

I thrive when the overall direction is clear, I’m fine with specific tasks as long as there isn’t persistent micromanagement, I prefer some degree of freedom, and work well with complex problems that don’t have a singular right solution, e.g. optimizing production load and investigating complex, distributed issues like outages and slowdowns.

I prefer respectful, supportive environments with product owners who know what they want; and agile delivery (generally prefer kanban than sprints).

As a temporary measure, you can contact me over at Tetratto. Spam-proof email address coming later.

Open source contributions

As my full-time jobs didn’t really allocate dedicated time to contributing to open source, and in general my MO was to explore new technologies and prepare them for others (e.g. nobody else knew how to configure ElasticSearch, and I did not either, but I researched it, made it usable, others started using it but not contributing to it, and I moved to other urgent tasks that nobody else wanted to solve like CI/CD, DBA, crashes and memory leaks) - as such, I rarely stuck to one domain for long enough to become good enough to contribute regularly. I did file 1-2 dozen bugs, submitted PRs or pointed out fixes to a handful.

webp2gif (small project)

CLI tool that converts animated .webp files to animated .gif. That’s all.

RAM Chomper (small project)

A simple utility that allocates and locks RAM to aid in benchmarking - by crudely simulating a low-RAM environment, which I’m guessing is going to stay relevant until RAM prices go down in 2075. RAM Chomper published on crates.io.

Odd achievements

  • Organized the first gamedev meetup in Slovakia.
  • First to deploy Kubernetes to production in Estonia.
  • Knows more assembly than 8 billion people (which is to say, knows very little assembly).
  • Smallest program written: 23B (MS-DOS; technically 1B but you know, the 23B displayed the MCGA palette).
  • Migrated content between 3+ CMS/blog platforms.
  • migrated between online databases with zero downtime + wrote helper scripts + dual-write code + reconciliation/verification code
  • migrated customer data between different platforms several times

Other projects

Cat Heap (2015)

  • clicker game that was intended to be a parody of clicker games
  • HTML/js based game available for BlackBerryOS 10 and Android (briefly)
  • and web, of course
  • poorly written hand crafted javascript + Phaser.js