The quiet end
of the stack.
Arthur Buikis · Riga, LV · backend & platform engineer · twelve-ish years in
— desaturated b&w
— natural light, no studio
— matte finish
Born in Latvia, first computer at fourteen, immediately started breaking things. Static sites, Minecraft servers, scripts to skip homework — by the time school was done, I'd self-taught Python well enough that people on Upwork were paying me to write it.
Twelve-ish years later, the itch is the same. Figure out how a system works, then make it work better. The surface changes — Django monoliths, scraping pipelines, ML integrations, the occasional Rust extension — the job doesn't. Ship something that quietly does its work, and keep doing that.
At a glance
- basedRiga, LV
- languagesLV · EN · RU · DE
- timeEU (CET/CEST)
- preferenceremote · EU-time team
- contracts12+ · 100% JSS
- years writing pythonsince 2015
Where I've been
- 2024 → nowSoftware Developermedia-processing platform · rigaPython + Rust platform behind virtual tours. Performance, ML pipeline integration, Kubernetes plumbing.
- 2021 – 2023Senior Developerstrange-logic · remoteSecond stint on TDN. Led the PHP → Python migration, brought ClickHouse in, built the Expired Domain Search pipeline.
- 2021Scraping Contractorlethub · remoteShort contract. A scraping pipeline for UK real-estate directories — designed the schema that held the 4.3 TB of listings and history.
- 2018 – 2021Developerstrange-logic · remoteFirst stint on TDN. Stripe migration, L2/L3 support work, and the start of what later became the second engagement.
- 2015 – 2018Self-taught, then paidupwork · early freelancePython, scraping, automation. First paid projects while still figuring things out.
Stack · what I actually reach for
Primary
- python
- rust
- typescript
- sql · bash
Python's the native tongue. Rust where it earns its keep.
Platform & Infra
- django · drf · channels
- fastapi · flask
- celery · rabbitmq · redis
- kubernetes · docker
- gitlab-ci · jenkins
Boring tech. Intentionally.
Data & ML
- postgresql · clickhouse
- mongodb · mysql
- triton inference
- shadow deploys · rollouts
- playwright · selenium
Mostly plumbing. The models aren't the hard part.
Everyday
- sentry · prometheus · grafana
- pyo3 · maturin · serde
- orjson · pytest · asyncio
- stripe · oauth
- tauri · react
Things on the keyboard this month.
Side things · what I've built on my own time
product · 2023– · live
MarkFlow
Solo-built social-analytics SaaS wired into the Meta and Google ad APIs. Quietly live at markflow.eu, with paying users.
python · typescript · stripe
product · 2020–2022 · sunset
MyProxy
Mobile-phone-as-proxy service for B2B customers. Multi-device rotation, a monitoring dashboard, paying accounts. Cost per GB came down by roughly 20× over the run.
python · android · infra
work · 2018–2023 · strange-logic
Expired Domain Search
Celery pipeline that crawled around 700M expired domains — DNS, WHOIS, screenshots, tech fingerprinting, email extraction. 43 TB across 12 servers by the end.
celery · clickhouse · dns/whois
What I don't do
A short anti-list.
- —Rewrite something that's working just because it looks old.
- —Reach for a new framework before the existing one is actually maxed out.
- —Ship a big change without a rollout plan and a way to back it out.
- —Treat "we don't have tests for that" as the same sentence as "we don't have observability for that." One is harder to live without.
- —Promise an estimate for a system I haven't read yet.
What I believe
—Code that doesn't need to be rewritten next year is more valuable than code that's clever today.
—Observability beats tests. Knowing something broke in prod is worth more than knowing it passed locally.
—Most "performance problems" are architecture problems one layer up.
—The best engineers I've worked with are boring to watch. They delete more than they add.