A cloud engineer, making sure systems work at scale.

I’ve been programming since high school, cutting my teeth/hands on the good ol’ LAMP stack. I love to build and automate things, and always have an ongoing side project. With a B.Sc. in Computer Science (thesis).

When away from computers, I enjoy dabbling on an acoustic guitar, playing football, and tinkering with cars & electronics.

Side projects

These are the (unfortunately minority) ones that at least got ‘shipped’, that is, got in the hands of actual users.

Instabody (2018)

Core functionality, the streamlined input via voice, was working well. Also had about 30 beta users on TestFlight. Alas, at that time, building UI was a slog. Nevertheless, the project gave me tremendous knowledge, both technically and about the domain itself. Might revisit with SwiftUI.

^{_{Making the above promo video for it was slighlty putting the cart before the horse. Though better to err on the side of too much marketing. Locking yourself into a room, hoping that merely building it will do, usually doesn’t work out that well. 😄}}

Some in-app shots below, of the daily summary (on the ‘Diary’ tab) and of the user’s profile (on the ‘Settings’ tab) respectively.

Tarot (2013 - 2023)

One of the oldest card games, quite popular in Central Europe, made for iPhone and iPad. It has had¹ both a single- and a multi-player mode. Early versions even had a 3rd mode, a multi-player mode via Bluetooth: the devices communicated directly with each other in a mesh, without a central router.

It is was¹ fully localized as Tarock in German, Tarok in Slovene.

It was also designed by me, for what it’s worth. Tarot is one of the oldest known card games, hence the skeuomorphic, textile design. Below is a closeup of a part of the main screen.

A review from the App Store:

“Very Good Slovenian Tarok App
★★★★★ by Oh what up
This app is perfect for a mobile version of Slovenian Tarok. Works great on both my iPad and iPhone. Layout and interface is smooth and gorgeous.”

Hearts (2013 - 2021)

Built off of the same ‘game engine’ as Tarot. Was shut down by Apple even before Tarot. (And rightfully so, as I didn’t keep up with later SDK updates.)

Here’s a video speedrun of a mixed match between 2 “AI” (“Maya” & “Anna”) and 2 human players.

End of the video also shows human players’ ELO ratings getting updated, onto Game Center, as the round finished.

Matchmaking was provided by iOS Game Center, while Tarot also had a custom, WebSockets backend. The UI & animations were built with Core Graphics and Core Animation.

Ad blocker for iOS (2015)

Shipped an ad blocker for iOS Safari when iOS 9 allowed developers to deliver custom content blocking extensions. The blocker worked globally, though was specifically targeting Slovenian media. Below is a before & after shot of a national newspaper.

Before	After