Andreas Johan Virkus

Updated November 2023
Tallinn, Estonia
write@andreasvirkus.me

Desired positions

Work

Klaus

April 2022
Front-End Technical Lead

Grew the Front-End team from myself to 9 people, helped get shape-up running as a development framework. Communicated tightly with the product & design teams to develop & grow a complex product in an unexplored market. Ran internal hackathons and helped drive other developer-facing initiatives like “Wisdom Club” to discuss various books, podcasts, articles on different developer & product related topics.

July 2018 – April 2022
Senior Product Developer

Joined a very early-stage startup as one of the first 2 developers to accompany the technical founder. Rebuilt the application from scratch with Vue, also shaping the product along the way & wearing various hats. Helped guide & maintain the internal company culture, set up processes & dealt with hiring.

Bigbank

Aug 2017 – Jul 2019
Full Stack Developer & Team Lead

Established & maintained an internal styleguide and the accompanying Vue component library. Co-lead a team of front-end developers & designers, acting as a task-force in the company, going on missions to help onboard various teams to both implement and contribute back to the component library. A lot of lobbying work and internal knowledge-sharing, educating.

Helped spin up various loan/debit applications and the accompanying micro-services with Node.js. Optimised the CI/CD pipeline. Helped establish and implement security best-practises. Kicked off and lead a project to share Express-like middlewares between different teams, so new applications could be implemented more quickly for each of the bank’s countries (9 in total).

Towards the end, stayed on as an external consultant to ease the handover process & guide some new exciting experiments with Web components and micro front-ends.

July 2015 – Augh 2017
Front-End Developer

Maintained a custom WordPress theme-builder, wrote and maintained a script compiler similar to Webpack/Browserify to fine-tune performance of those drag-and-drop sections (jQuery module library of ~200 modules). Advocated for and implemented unit testing for the jQuery modules.

Helped set up monitoring & benchmarks for accessibility, performance & basic security practises - preaching for CSPs and correct security headers, etc. (before they came a widely known standard as they are today), across a suite of public websites (in 9 countries), the bank’s various deposit and loan form applications and self-service applications.

Campaigned for the need for a universal component-driven framework in our front-end stack. Vetted Angular/React/Vue and decided to bet on Vue in the early days of Vue 2. Kicked off our efforts to move away from outsourced designers to build our own internal design team, that would collaborate tightly with our growing front-end team.

Saue High School

January 2015 – May 2016
Programming teacher

Teaching a beginner’s course in Python. Planning the curriculum, teaching primary & high school students basic syntax, programming principles & building a text-adventure game and some websites.

Freelance developer

Since 2014

Over the years I’ve worked my way up from delivering small static sites to friends of family & local businesses, to complex & interactive visual applications, e-commerce solutions and audiovisual experiments. I consult companies & also sometimes do pro-bono work.

Strong suites

Education