Having my first website developed in 2002 I’ve been actively in web development for 10 years. HTML 4, CSS 2 and PHP 4 + MySQL were technologies that powered my own custom Content Management System which was successfully running on early version of personal blog and Need for Speed game dedicated site nfstuning.com which later evolved to Lithuanian automotive news website autonews.lt with more than 2500 unique visitors daily at it’s peak.

Not only my first website was born during my studies in Kaunas university of Technology Gymnasium – I also wrote several articles for Lithuanian IT magazine Kompiuterija. This activity tuned into something bigger afterwards – in later years of Informatics studies in Vilnius university I also worked as IT journalist for another Lithuanian magazine Naujoji komunikacija. Couple years of writing about newest industry trends and online services got me into technical writing and encouraged to start own blog at repecka.com.

In 2009 I migrated my blog (and later autonews.lt as well) to WordPress. While at that time WordPress was mainly intended for blogging, one couldn’t see so many content and functionality rich websites as we have today powered by this magnificent open source software. This is where my WordPress journey began: core didn’t have automatic updates back then, themes had to be tweaked by editing their .php files and modifying or writing own plugins was mandatory to get any more advanced functionality. Nowadays we have powerful themes like Avada, multilingual beast WPML (which I’ve been using almost from it’s beginning) and custom content tools packed into Toolset.

Couple years later, in mid-2011 I started my career in enterprise data warehouse. Working as Software Developer and afterwards System Analyst I learned to apply data modeling and normalization in practice next to developing ETL processes. Key technologies used:

  • Teradata Database (and FS-LDM)
  • Oracle Data Integrator
  • Informatica PowerCenter
  • Oracle Database.

To share experience in this field I started writing Data Developer Insights microblog.

While I continue working as Software Engineer in data field, I also attend and post about events, comment technology related topics in media, from time to time buy new domains and setup web servers. I like to own, understand and tweak my infrastructure therefore I run:

  • authoritative and resolver DNS;
  • mail;
  • web;
  • MySQL and PostgreSQL servers;
  • private Nextcloud
  • fediverse-enabled instances of Twitter alternative Mastodon, video platworm PeerTube and minimalistic blogging system WriteFreely.

Gaming and automotive are huge passions of mine therefore from time to time I tend to cross-over these fields of interest with IT. On-board diagnostics is an example of this, in the very near future I plan to do some game streaming and gaming equipment reviews.

Main technologies currently in my focus area:

  • Go programming language: especially concurrency and developing microservices;
  • Linux (esp. CentOS) based servers powering internet services (DNSSEC enabled DNS, mail servers with DKIM, reverse proxying and caching);
  • Social networks and services which can federate using ActivityPub or other open standards;
  • Smart home automation;
  • SoC devices (Raspberry Pi, Odroid, Khadas) running Ubuntu and Android;
  • other open source software and open hardware.