About me
Gkiokan Sali

// The Beginning (Beninging)

My very first experience was around the age of 15 when I started developing an Intranet in HTML strict 1.1, CSS, and Vanilla JS for my friends to share Game Configurations and .dll extensions for Diablo II and Command & Conquer. That came along with a bit of reverse engineering for Game Serial Numbers and Cheats, because we were broke and couldn't afford everything. I remember how simple it was back then to run scripts through Internet Explorer 4 with full access privileges. Back in that time, our most used apps for communicating and entertainment were probably MSN, ICQ, and Winamp.

While digging deeper into development, I didn't have full access to the Internet. Only at school. Even then, there was almost no useful resource like we have today. No StackOverflow, no YouTube. Only forums and documentations. I had to learn developing through reading books and experimenting with hard trial and error to fix issues until I got it or figured out stuff, how to do this and that.

Learning how to code with that kind of limited accessibility is unimaginable nowadays. But it brought me so much. I ran through the struggle and I can say everything that I touch I understand fully. This makes me an exceptional developer from that era.

From my school time until my Software Engineer educational graduation, I worked across different jobs. I went to the military, did cleaning, car detailing, being a Quality Manager, tuning cars (2 Fast 2 Furious era... I was there), was an IT Service Technician... and finally got the chance to educate myself and finish it in 2016. With a quite good score. First try. With an overall score of 89 points — locking in a final grade of 1.75.

// Job entry

Thanks to my previous experience, I had a super start as a Web Developer in my job, so I got lucky to work for big companies. One of them was CANCOM SE. That time was the peak era of WordPress; I built SDKs and exclusive plugins, themes, and business-logic-based code for WP. I became a WordPress Enterprise Developer. Tweaking WordPress to its hidden power. I mastered WordPress deeply from 2016 to 2019. I even built a Game Engine with WordPress in PHP—just a PoC.

Then I moved on to something real. My first Enterprise SaaS Development job as a freelancer in 2019, not for someone random, it was for Allianz Technology SE. I am not allowed to talk about it in detail, but believe me, it was something important that is internally used even today. I even accidentally found an installation method on the target devices to bypass the MDM security boundaries.

// Expanding Szenes

2021, Corona hits hard. I moved on. I found the Sony HackerOne agreement and the PlayStation Homebrew scene. I built the famous Remote Package Sender v2. Same tech stack I love, but different targets this time. Stepping into Hybrid Cross-Application building. Different OS, different troubles. I got through it. It went viral. With that impact, I found new friends and amazing brains in the scene. This led into hardware, firmware, and Homebrew development, which is a whole other story than Web Development. One side project was to build the SaaS platform for the Homebrew Store — the PKG-zone. It serves all the Homebrew applications for the whole scene and is called the HB-Store. Of course, my application had the first embedded implementation of the HB-Store to manage your packages and homebrews running on your console. The scene achieved great progress in doing all the work, that's honorable. I did a great job of building a great tool upon those achievements.

// Hardware and Electronics Development

Around the same time, I took a detour into hardware. I modded my own KORG Trinity with features from newer generation synths, repairing and tuning it to give it a completely new life. I modded the Arturia MK2 with a custom extension board that integrates the KORG Kronos Ribbon and the Casio CZ Pitch Bend. This got me deep into electronics: soldering, microchips, ESP, Arduino, electrical components, and writing custom firmware.

// Mastering Stack

In the meantime, I built amazing projects and products. I expanded my design templating knowledge — have a peek preview in my Pinterest pins — and my tech skills. Building Websites for high performance as SPA, PWA, or MPA is easy for me, settling here on Astro, HTML, JS, CSS3, and Vue for the frontend. Backend and API-based business logic depends on the job, but Laravel, Go, or Rust is a great choice here.

// Peak in Handcrafted coding as Fullstack Dev

Since then, I have focused on building SaaS platform applications at the enterprise level. From planning the architecture to code structure, deployment strategies, monitoring server status, and tracking SLA, I support my customers in all their technical needs.

Now I am here. Ready to get hired for my next Challenge!