Ibrahim Šuta

I've built new products, rebuilt older platforms, and helped get struggling projects back on track. That work has taken me through SaaS, marketplaces, finance, and field services.

I stay involved in the code and deployment because it helps me understand how the whole system behaves.

I keep a library of templates and starter packages from past projects, so a new project starts from working code instead of an empty repository.

I choose the stack to fit the project. C# and .NET are the tools I know best.

Coding agents handle much of the implementation these days. I give them focused pieces of work, review what they produce, and test the changes before they ship. I handle the architecture and tradeoffs, and decide what gets merged.

I also work through the scope with the client, especially when the requirements are still taking shape.

One recent project helps staff find answers in company documents. It runs on the company's own machines using .NET, Blazor, and local models through Ollama.

The app searches the documents and includes references back to the sources. I test it against a set of questions to check the retrieval and answers, including cases where the documents don't contain an answer.

Another project is Ask DHH. It uses DHH's public writing and interviews to estimate his views, with references readers can check for themselves.

Daily driver: Arch Linux with Hyprland, Ghostty, and a custom zsh setup.

Secondary: Windows 11 for Visual Studio, diagnostics, and cross-platform QA.

macOS for native builds, iOS checks, and media exports.

Coding agents first: pi, Codex, and Claude Code in the terminal, with ChatGPT alongside. When I write the code myself, JetBrains Rider for large projects, VS Code for quick edits, and Azure Data Studio and DataGrip for databases.

Also daily: Talk2Text, my own push-to-talk dictation running Whisper locally, Wayscriber for on-screen annotation, and a terminal setup of Neovim, lazygit, btop, fzf, and zoxide with a Starship prompt.

Main workstation: a desktop with 128 GB RAM, NVMe storage, and two calibrated 4K monitors.

On the road: an M-series MacBook Pro and a Windows laptop, both fully encrypted.

Fiber internet with LTE failover.

Mesh Wi-Fi and remote power control, so I can reach my machines while traveling or during an outage.

• Built MVPs from scratch and made existing MVPs stable and production-ready on tight deadlines.
• Designed the architecture and chose the technical direction for each project.
• Migrated projects from legacy .NET Framework 4.x to .NET Core and .NET 6.
• Configured CI/CD from scratch across Azure, DigitalOcean, Heroku, and private Linux servers.
• Mentored teammates and advised clients on technical decisions and delivery planning.
• Built custom software around each client's business needs and production constraints.
• Designed architecture and implemented ASP.NET Core and Web API applications.
• Led a five-person team, reviewed other developers' code, and worked directly with clients on requirements and specs.

• Delivered software for Toptal clients across insurance, telecom, identity, SaaS, and enterprise systems.
• Built and maintained partner API integrations, authentication flows, and back-end services used in production.
• Worked with distributed teams and client stakeholders to clarify requirements and keep releases on schedule.
• Improved existing systems through refactoring, integration testing, architecture cleanup, and production-focused code reviews.

• Implemented and maintained carrier and partner API integrations for policy onboarding workflows.
• Coordinated new integrations from requirements and technical discovery through testing and production release.
• Added automated validation and integration checks to reduce manual verification before release.
• Refactored legacy onboarding code paths to make the flow easier to maintain and support.

• Migrated a production enterprise application from ASP.NET on .NET Framework 4.7 to .NET Core 2.2, 3.0, and 3.1.
• Set up Azure environments, pipelines, and monitoring for every delivery stage.
• Implemented IdentityServer-based SSO wired into Angular front-ends and corporate identity providers.
• Worked with distributed teams to keep the global release plan on track.

• Delivered configurable web applications and automation tooling end-to-end.
• Worked across React, AngularJS, TypeScript, and Meteor on startup web applications.
• Mentored engineers while implementing payment flows and CI/CD automation.
• Built a cross-platform Electron automation tool for repetitive design workflows.

• Delivered enterprise ASP.NET MVC platforms with a team of six engineers.
• Mentored developers, performed code reviews, and worked directly with the client on requirements.
• Implemented Azure-hosted CI/CD pipelines via TeamCity and Octopus Deploy.
• Improved performance on datasets with millions of records and tightened production monitoring.

• Built ingestion for public writing and interview transcripts, preserving publication dates and speaker attribution so answers can be traced back to their sources.
• Combined pgvector semantic search with PostgreSQL full-text search, then ranked the evidence using relevance, source authority, speaker attribution, and date.
• Added likely-position and generated-reply modes, with server-side citation checks and handling for questions with insufficient evidence.
• Built the ASP.NET Core API and Vue frontend, with generated API types, shareable answers, and support for hosted Cloudflare models or local Ollama models.

• Designed the workflow around immutable case versions and evidence-backed reasoning blocks. Citations are typed as supports, contradicts, or context. Submission attempts and returned assessments are immutable, and revisions keep their history.
• Built instructor authoring and live evidence release, learner workspaces and feedback, an interactive public tour, and short-lived isolated demo sandboxes.
• Implemented tenant-scoped server authorization, optimistic concurrency, role-separated PostgreSQL access, durable Graphile Worker jobs, and transactional Socket.IO invalidations with polling fallback.
• Packaged the self-hosted stack with Nginx and Docker Compose, plus quarantined file handling, signed backup/restore verification, observability, and an optional authorization-filtered local Ollama RAG adapter.

• Built the full RAG pipeline end to end: TXT/PDF extraction, text normalization, overlapping chunking, and batched embeddings indexed in PostgreSQL + pgvector behind an HNSW cosine index.
• Every answer uses only the retrieved context. Citations are rebuilt in C# from the source records rather than taken from model output, so the system cannot invent a policy or fake a source.
• Runs fully local on Ollama models, qwen3:14b for chat and nomic-embed-text for embeddings, so sensitive business documents never leave the network and no third-party AI API is involved.
• Shipped the whole product: streaming chat UI, authenticated upload, re-index, and delete, background ingestion, health checks, and a Q&A evaluation set to tune retrieval, thresholds, and prompts.

• Replaced a legacy system with 500k+ lines of modern C# spanning scheduling, billing, and work-order domains.
• Kept core latency under 50 ms and uptime at 99.9% while shipping new features every week.
• Designed domain-driven modules with CQRS and event-driven automation, including thousands of recurring maintenance tasks.
• Handled architecture, implementation, and production operations as the only engineer.

• Built a complete annotation toolkit with pressure-sensitive pen and highlighter input, shapes, arrows, text, sticky notes, blur, screen eyedropper, selection, and full undo/redo.
• Designed persistent boards, pages, and named sessions alongside ZoomIt-style zoom, screen freeze, click highlights, light passthrough, and PNG/PDF capture workflows.
• Implemented native tablet and touchscreen input, multi-monitor workflows, command and radial palettes, configurable toolbars, and roughly 130 rebindable actions.
• Shipped an optional Rust GUI configurator and maintain APT, RPM, AUR, Nix, and direct-download packages for the major Wayland compositors.

• Built seven multiplayer games: Connect Four, Typing Race, Word Duel, Speed Math, Tic-Tac-Toe, Rock Paper Scissors, and four-player Ludo.
• Implemented skill-based matchmaking for guests and registered players, with real-time game state, spectating, match chat, and rematch flows over SignalR.
• Persisted match results, XP, levels, ranks, and global and per-game leaderboards through ASP.NET Core Identity and EF Core.
• Automated build, test, publish, health checks, EF migrations, and systemd deployment to a self-hosted Linux server with GitHub Actions.

• Reimplemented backend services from scratch with Camunda process orchestration.
• Launched IdentityServer-based authentication for multi-tenant government workflows.
• Wrote integration and performance test suites that run on every release.
• Worked with the process, UI, and API teams to keep process models, screens, and API contracts consistent.

• Migrated the platform from .NET Framework 4.7 to .NET Core 3.1 with zero downtime and cut CI build times by over 40%.
• Automated the Azure deployment pipeline from dev through production, which cut release cycles from weeks to same-day.
• Unified authentication across five internal apps and the corporate identity providers with IdentityServer, and login support tickets dropped.
• Set up cross-team quality gates and rollback playbooks. The multi-country release shipped on schedule with zero production incidents.

• Built barcode tracking, evidence logs, and digital submission workflows end-to-end.
• Led a six-person team through discovery, delivery, and multi-agency rollout.
• Turned a one-off build into a configurable product that other departments adopted.
• Ran pairing, code reviews, and guild sessions for the wider engineering team.