“Programming is what will deliver the future from the SCI-FI movies”

To honour International Programmer’s Day, we had a very insightful talk with our colleague Stiliyan Kanchev from team News UK. He is a Senior Backend Engineer and very passionate about his work. Scroll down to find out what we’ve talked about and may your code rock!

Tell us a bit about yourself and your professional background?

My journey into Software Engineering began in my high school years. I was interested in how a browser-based game I played was made.

For a few years, I read books, studied codebases, and experimented. And not long after that came my first production experience as a part-time developer.

Since then, I have had opportunities to work in a start-up and corporate environment with amazing professionals all around the world.

You are currently a Senior Backend Engineer at team News UK, tell us more about your role and main responsibilities?

I am part of the MAIN team. We are developing a platform that handles the Monetization, Access, and Identity services across News UK. We use Go to build and develop our platform to meet the safety, performance & cost requirements.
All teams in News UK are empowered to work on solutions that span across infrastructure and different tech stacks.

How does your typical day at News UK look like?

MAIN is vital to News UK and each day we provide monitoring and support for our system, as well as feature delivery. We use 3rd party services like Harness to handle automatic releases. This helps us to have fast and stable releases cycles

On a typical day, you could make changes to our K8s clusters, deliver a new payment feature in Go, scale our RDS cluster or help out to test a feature.

What’s the most challenging part of your job?

Staying up to date with so many technologies is challenging. It helps a lot when you have colleagues with different backgrounds and interests that are a Slack message away.

What excites you about your work?

I am very excited to have the opportunity to work with the latest technology and deliver E2E solutions for the business. Thanks to the amazing teams in News UK, we are always ready for the next challenge.

Today we celebrate International Programmer’s Day, how important is the programming profession in your opinion?

The fact is that you read the news online, learn from online courses and pay bills online. Digitalization makes goods cheaper and more accessible. Programming is what will deliver the future from the SCI-FI movies.

What does programming give you personally?

Flexibility. I can work with everyone from anywhere.

In case you’ve missed, team News UK at Pwrteams is constantly growing. So, if you are looking for your next career challenge, make sure to check out the current vacancies here.