Mihai Mandrescu

mihai@mandrescu.co · +44 7403 53 71 89

Summary 📝

🌍 I’m a remote first engineer, specialising in web development
🚀 I’m passionate about performance and usability
🔥 A problem solver at heart

Stack, skills, tools 🛠

My choice of vcs is no doubt Git and my infrastructure usually sits on AWS ☁️ More likely than not I set it up with Terraform.
Usually I prototype my React ⚛️ components with Storybook and Chromatic. To manage my state, my first choice is context but if I can't have that, it's Redux all the way. I bundle with Webpack 📦 most of the time, but I'm happy to roll otherwise, such as up 😉
The backend, it's either Node or Django, usually talking to a Mongo cluster, ideally in GraphQL. I'm big on testing so Jest and Cypress comes in really handy! For Cypress at least, testing is a boring use case. Ask me more! 😁
Sadly, I have experience with Wordpress 🙁
At the end, when all is done, I keep an eye on stuff in Newrelic while enjoying some coffee ☕️

Javascript · Node · Python · Typescript · SQL · Tensorflow · Akamai · Lighthouse · CSS · Emotion · BEM · REST

If I learned anything from my machine learning 🤖 work, robots love keywords. Tossed a few in just for them ☝️

Work 🤝

Senior Software Engineer
News UK - The Sun - London
February 2019 - December 2021

News UK is a British newspaper publisher and one of the largest players in the industry. In this role, my work was for The Sun, one of the largest publications in the UK. I was part of The Sun title team, the group responsible for the development and maintenance of a website with over five million daily users 💪
  • I improved The Sun performance across several web vitals, both core and non-core. I reduced both First Contentful Paint and Time to Interactive by a few seconds, as well as improving the Cumulative Layout Shift 📈
  • I overhauled the CSS architecture resulting in a two thirds decrease of the payload 💨 Read more about it here
  • I leveraged caching to reduce AWS resource use, thus saving the company over £2000 per month 💷
  • I migrated the consent manager from Onetrust to Sourcepoint across all Sun websites, thus reminding myself how complicated GDPR 🇪🇺 and CCPA ☀️🏄🌴 are!
  • I helped perform a major infrastructure change, moving The Sun from AWS EB to EKS. We did this in stages and employed a blue/green strategy for traffic routing.
  • I collaborated closely with the analytics team on several occasions, for tasks ranging from Tealium integration to setting up an entire recommendation system.
    • I conducted several A/B and multivariate tests using Optimizely 👨‍🔬 resulting in improvements to metrics such as recirculation, conversion and time on site.
  • In general, developed, maintained and refactored The Sun website, touching everything from infrastructure, Wordpress integration, SSR, client side React, performance improvements, third party integration and more 🤩
Software Engineer
Applied Blockchain - London
February 2018 - February 2019

Applied Blockchain is a blockchain applications development company, focusing on distributed ledger technology and smart contracts. During my time here, I worked on several web3 applications.

  • I worked on a blockchain powered distributed exchange. I used React, Redux and other libraries in the React ecosystem such as saga, persist, validate and grommet to provide a interface suitable for trading 💸
  • I lead frontend development for a blockchain based registration system for drones. I used Material UI to build a mobile first application that allows users to register drones and interact with the aviation authorities ✈️
  • I built using React Native a crypto currency application. This project interfaced with the blockchain through the companies in house library built on top of web3 🔗
  • I built and delivered several proof of concept applications developed with React and koa, including a blockchain enabled booking service.
Lead Software Engineer
Intelliagg - London
November 2015 - February 2018

Intelliagg by Threat Finder is an expert-led, cyber threat intelligence managed service that monitors public, private and darknet sources to identify different types of threats.

  • Using node, I build an evidence archiving system 🗃️ This system used headless Chrome to visit and archive websites. Based on demand, node worker processes are created on a EC2 autoscaling group. They consume an api that provides them with urls to archive. The node process connect to the headless chrome instance via puppeteer and drive the browser to the url from the api. There, they screenshot and pdf the website or hidden service. The generated content is stored on S3, using the node aws sdk.
  • I designed and implemented a deep learning, convolutional neural network 🕸️ using the Tensorflow framework together with numpy, in python 3. This was based on Yann LeCun's LeNet-5 network, adapted for text data as opposed to image inputs.
  • Developed and maintained the client application, wrote in React. This application allows users to view and respond to events generated by the platform.
  • Additionally, I architected and deployed a client application capable of reaching both regular sites and hidden services using aiohttp.
  • I wrote an orchestration system for deploying and monitoring tor nodes. I used the python boto3 library to automatically provide and clean up resources used by tor nodes, based on data obtained from status providers, both internal and external such as blutmagie.
  • Set up a private tor network using chutney ( also available here ) and deployed several patched Tor nodes, in order to assess different data collection strategies.
  • Used the python stem library to build a client capable of quickly assessing the status of hidden services on the tor network. This was done as part of an effort to better understand and map the hidden service lifecycle 🔍
  • I improved the matching engine by moving from a regex search approach, done with the re2 library to a search based on the Aho–Corasick algorithm. This was done using pyahocorasick.
  • Worked on developing a user facing, mobile first application, built with Vue.js and its material design implementation, Vuetify.
  • Used Selenium both for end to end testing and for content collection. I build using Selenium a web crawler that rendered a Firefox browser in a x server and used the browser to access otherwise unavailable content, such as those hidden behind a captcha.
  • I built an asynchronous client application using the Twisted library for python2.
  • Dramatically improved the performance of the document matching engine by switching from python's native re library to Google’s re2 regex engine.
  • Developed several Django and web.py apps used internally, along with some REST apis.
  • Used React and Redux to build a responsive, modern portal.
  • Designed and implemented a text classifier using sklearn and nltk 🤖
  • Worked extensively with MongoDB, ElasticSearch and Amazon Web Services (EC2 and S3). I leveraged Mongos document oriented architecture and flexible aggregation pipeline to extract meaningful information and visualise them, mostly with matplotlib and highcharts.
  • Learned about and applied software engineering good practices such as TDD and agile development.
Software Engineer
Gameloft - Bucharest
June 2014 - November 2014

Gameloft is a multinational company and a leader in the development and publishing of mobile games.

  • Working as a software engineer at Gameloft, I became familiar with the gaming industry and the IT industry in general.
  • I was responsible with building data models and reliable tools to obtain and assess information regarding different games. This included everything from financial reports and key performance indicators to user engagement statistics and anti hacking activities.

Education 🎓

Bachelor of Science
University of Bucharest
October 2012 - October 2016

Side Projects 🚧

Hobbies and Interests 🎮

I got into programming in high school. Besides what I did in school, I also started doing tutorials from YouTube. I remember my first Unity 3D tutorial , from a German vlogger. I didn't really understand what he was saying but I typed what he was typing and somehow, a little racing game was made. The thrill of making something so awesome never left me and keeps me passionate to this day. I’m also an avid gamer, a huge fan of grand strategies, city builders and management games.