POETICUS
I — · — · —
000
Software Engineer & Creative

Jovan Jevtić

work, experience and skills

This portfolio strives to comprehensively present my personality and work, but primarily focuses on professional activities in the field of software engineering and information technology.

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On Origin
At twelve,
a cursor blinked
on a dark screen and
everything
changed.
Not a career choice —
a recognition.
This is where
curiosity
finds its form.
What follows is a decade of that impulse:
to take apart,
to understand,
to rebuild
better than before.

The fundamental characteristics

The need for creation, curiosity, the need to understand the world around me, and a thirst for new knowledge—which from the earliest years found their most fertile ground in software, and informatics and computing in general.

At twelve years old began my daily journey through code and computer systems—from microprocessor architecture to the sophisticated levels of abstraction that characterize application software today.

After more than a decade of practical engagement with computers, and almost a decade of writing software, today I can present my technical knowledge as the result of years of consistent dedication to every aspect of software development—from basic logic and understanding hardware limitations to complex architectures of distributed systems.

What emerges is less a collection of skills than a way of working. The same attention that goes into debugging a production incident goes into shaping a reusable abstraction, or refactoring an old module to match a cleaner mental model. The job is never merely to ship—it is to leave behind code that the next engineer will want to read, and systems that continue to explain themselves long after the original author has moved on.

Dante Alighieri in red robe with laurel crown, the Vita Nuova open on his lap (watercolor)
"

I see myself as homo poeticus who seeks creative synthesis through all aspects of work.

All of this converges, or rather: all of this is the convergence. The code I write carries the same aesthetic demand as the sentence I construct. The architecture of a distributed system mirrors the architecture of an argument. There is no separation between technical and humanistic—that distinction belongs to an era of specialization I refuse to inherit.

The literary tradition that shaped my thinking runs through the French moralists and Russian maximalists in equal measure—André Gide's acte gratuit and the liberation of authentic action, Proust's obsessive archaeology of memory and time, Dostoevsky's unflinching descent into the cellars of human psychology where logic dissolves into paradox.

Philosophy functions here not as academic credential but as operational framework. Kierkegaard's leap remains the founding gesture—the recognition that at some point analysis must yield to commitment, that infinite reflection is paralysis dressed in sophistication.

On Craft

Philosophy gives you the questions. Engineering demands the answers. Between the thinking and the building lives the work that matters late nights, broken deploys, elegant solutions, and the slow accumulation of craft.

What does a decade of work become?

Seven roles, two acts — engineering, and the craft around it.

software · engineering.ts
INSTRCMM-04
X0000
Y0000
PT00 / 00
p 0.00

A decade
of software.

// the act of engineering, in plain words
import { pipe } from "./pipe"
import { observe, design, build, measure, refine } from "./craft"
export const engineering = pipe(observe, design, build, measure, refine)
// observe, design, build, measure, refine —
// repeat until the seam disappears.
// since 2014 · 47 / 47 tests passing

A decade
of software.

portfolio.jovansoftwareengineering.ts
since 2014
output
problems
debug console
ports
software · engineering.ts
build ready

Logic, structure,
the long refinement.

engineering act = ;

After more than a decade of practical engagement with computers, and almost a decade of writing software, I can present my technical knowledge as the result of years of consistent dedication to every aspect of software development — from basic logic and hardware limitations to the complex architecture of distributed systems.

My starting point was a simple fascination with creating something from nothing using code; over time it became a professional orientation in which I mastered almost every segment of modern software development.

Already at twelve I built my first static web pages — a field of experimentation, but also an introduction to systematic, structured thinking. As my interest grew, focus shifted to dynamic systems, where I began developing my own frontend applications, paying special attention to interface, experience and accessibility.

Soon after, backend logic became the natural next step: building APIs, implementing business logic, and solving the problems that appear when applications must talk to databases, manage users, respect security and scale. What shaped me most was going through every phase independently — idea, design, implementation, testing, deployment, optimization — which forced me to understand how each layer works and how they coexist.

Over time I built solutions that resist simple patterns — web portals for news agencies, e-commerce with complex inventory and payment logic, internal analytics tools, and services drawing on many APIs: financial, crypto markets, health standards. Connecting that many sources and interfaces meant constantly minding performance, security and scalability.

In recent years I have focused intensively on mobile, with Expo and React Native at the core — not extended web interfaces but independent products using geolocation, offline capability, authentication, push notifications and the camera, with a deep grasp of the whole ecosystem, from state and local databases to UI performance and store distribution.

Authentication and security hold a special place: I have always built my own login systems rather than settle for ready-made libraries, designing flows for every scenario — multiple devices, automatic token renewal, abuse protection, identity verification — tested on real users in production.

My deepest competency is broader architecture — systems that grow and live for years without falling when users multiply tenfold. One result I am proud of: verifying authentic physical locations without the Google Places API (now largely withdrawn from open use), by combining web scraping, AI analysis, local heuristics and many public and closed sources.

A special focus is the practical application of AI. Within my startup I built an AI assistant that personalizes the experience through contextual content — connecting people with events, places and points of interest by behavior, location and interest — combining data analysis, semantic processing, geolocation and vector search. The work spans LLM integration through APIs and retrieval-augmented generation: embedding models, vector databases and proprietary filtering to search by meaning, not form.

I am comfortable building the interface logic that talks to LLMs — conversational flows, fallback mechanisms, relevance evaluation — for real control over AI behavior. And beyond practice: during my software-engineering studies I chose electives in machine learning, statistical modeling and AI for a deeper mathematical foundation.

Engineering · Full-stack web

Sites, shops,
dashboards.

Whatever the web needs — built on Next.js and Nuxt over Strapi and Drizzle, one typed codebase from database to DOM.

jjovan.com
Senior Full-Stack Developerexperience
Next.jsNodePostgreSQLRedisStrapiStripe

I worked on web portals for news agencies, e-commerce systems with complex inventory and payment logic, internal tools for business analytics, and services that pull from many APIs — financial, crypto markets, health standards.

By building systems that connect many different data sources and interfaces, I had to take care of performance, security and scalability — which further sharpened my engineering sense.

Designing and implementing scalable web portals for news agencies with real-time content management systems optimized for multi-admin workflow and exponential reader growth.

Development of advanced e-commerce platforms with complex inventory management logic, multi-vendor functionalities and integration with multiple payment gateways (Stripe, PayPal, local banks).

Implementation of distributed caching strategies using Redis for application performance optimization with 70% reduction in loading times.

Creating internal tools for business analytics with real-time dashboards and custom reporting systems.

Integration with financial APIs (Alpha Vantage, Yahoo Finance) and crypto market data for developing a trading analytics platform.

Implementation of ETL processes for processing large amounts of structured and unstructured data.

SHIPPED · 2024 NEXT.JS · STRAPI
Engineering · Mobile — Expo

Apps for iOS
and Android.

One React Native codebase on Expo, shipped to both stores — typed, with live data and encrypted messaging.

Lead Mobile Developerexperience
React NativeExpoSocket.IOEASSQLiteE2E

On React Native and Expo I build complete products, not extended web views — social platforms with feeds, profiles, media and real-time messaging, shipped to both stores.

Going through the whole mobile lifecycle — native modules, offline, background tasks, store distribution — means owning every layer, from local databases to UI performance.

Architecting and developing complete social networks on React Native with functionalities at the level of the most advanced global platforms.

Implementation of sophisticated feed algorithms with personalized content delivery, real-time updates and advanced engagement metrics.

Real-time messaging infrastructure with end-to-end encryption, group chats, media sharing and push notifications.

Creating complex user profiles with hierarchical account types, role-based permissions and granular privacy controls.

Advanced media processing — image/video upload, real-time filters, compression algorithms and cloud storage optimization.

Social discovery mechanisms with location-based services, interest-matching algorithms and recommendation engines.

Custom native modules for OS-level integrations, including camera pipeline modifications and secure storage.

Background task scheduling with auto-scaling for data sync and location tracking within platform constraints.

Complex navigation flows with deep linking and universal link handling.

END-TO-END ENCRYPTED EXPO SDK 54
Engineering · System architecture

APIs, data,
real-time.

Typed Node services over Postgres — REST and WebSocket, encryption, and the schemas everything else is built on.

api.jjovan.com / streams / live
backend — zsh~/api

~/api $ node server.ts

✓ postgres connected · pool 20

✓ migrations up to date

✓ redis · ws gateway ready

→ listening :443 · p95 47ms

POST /api/auth 201 12ms

GET  /api/feed 200 9ms

ws room#42 joined · 3 peers

# Senior Backend Architect

Designing and implementing event-driven microservice architecture with auto-scaling capabilities and sub-100ms response times under any load conditions.

Building distributed systems using Docker containerization with intelligent load balancing and failover mechanisms across multiple availability zones.

Architecting database sharding and replication strategies for PostgreSQL clusters designed to seamlessly handle exponential data growth.

Implementation of Turborepo-based monorepo architecture that reduces build times by 60% through intelligent caching and task parallelization.

Designing modular package architecture that enables code reuse across web, mobile and API surfaces.

Building custom deployment orchestration tools for coordinated releases across multiple services and environments.

P95 · 47ms NODE · POSTGRES · SOCKET.IO
Engineering · DevOps & infra

From repo
to production.

Turborepo monorepos through Docker and CI to AWS, GCP and Cloudflare — typed configs, deploys gated on lint, types and tests.

turbo · monorepo · deploy / main
ci — pipelinedeploy / main

$ ci run --pipeline deploy

✓ install · cached

✓ lint · types · 0 errors

✓ test · 142 passed

→ docker build · 12.4s

→ push ghcr.io/jjovan/api:sha

✓ deploy · blue-green · 0 downtime

→ k8s rollout complete · 3/3 ready

# Specialized Competencies & System Administration

Managing cloud resources on platforms (AWS, GCP, Cloudflare) with automated scaling groups.

Implementation of CI/CD pipelines using GitHub Actions, Docker and Kubernetes for zero-downtime deployments.

Database sharding and read replica strategies for PostgreSQL systems with millions of records.

Designing custom authentication protocols with multi-factor authentication and OAuth 2.0/JWT implementations.

Implementation of zero-trust security model with end-to-end communication encryption.

Development of session management systems supporting simultaneous sessions on multiple devices with automatic token refresh mechanisms.

Implementation of RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation) systems with vector embedding for semantic search.

Integration of Large Language Models (GPT, Claude) through optimized API communication flows.

Development of AI assistant with contextual understanding and personalized content delivery system.

Working with Linux operating systems and remote access via SSH for configuration and maintenance of server environments.

Application of infrastructure-as-code approach using tools like Terraform and Ansible for consistent environment provisioning.

14 PACKAGES TURBOREPO · CI / CD
II — The answer experience

Founder, designer, art director.

Experience · Founder

My own
startup.

blink — a studio I run end to end. Five products across social, mobility, local, learning and writing, all on the same TypeScript stack.

Startup & Innovative Projectsexperience
iOS / AndroidAIGeolocationWebSocketPWA

As lead I take products end to end — a mobile platform with a web component, built on hard problems most teams reach for an API to avoid.

The one I am proudest of: verifying authentic physical locations without the Google Places API, by combining web scraping, AI analysis and local heuristics.

Lead developer on a complex mobile platform (iOS / Android) with a web component.

Proprietary algorithm for physical location verification without Google Places API dependencies.

AI-powered recommendation engine with geolocation intelligence for personalized user connections.

Custom web-scraping systems with AI analysis for Point-of-Interest entity validation.

Real-time collaboration features with WebSocket communication and conflict-resolution algorithms.

Progressive web application with an offline-first approach and service-worker optimizations.

05 PRODUCTS ONE WORKSHOP
Experience · Designer

I design
what I build.

Editorial type, motion and interface systems in Figma — then built in code, not handed off.

specimen · jjovan / type-system / v3
UI / UX & Designcraft
FigmaDesign systemsTypeMotion

I do not hand designs off — I draw the interface, then build it in code myself, so intent survives all the way to the DOM.

Editorial type, restrained palettes and motion that means something: the design and the implementation are the same decision.

Designing interface and experience with attention to hierarchy, accessibility and the feel of every state.

Building design systems — tokens, components, type scales — that stay consistent across web and mobile.

Motion as language: scroll-driven reveals and transitions tuned for weight, not decoration.

Graphic and editorial work — layout, specimen, identity — carried through to production.

Closing the gap between Figma and the running product, because I own both ends.

240+ FRAMES / PR NO DROPPED SCROLLS
Experience · Art director

I set
the look.

One visual language across the whole product — type, colour, rhythm, restraint — set once and held on every screen.

Art Directioncraft
TypeColourGridBrand

Beyond the interface there is a visual language — the tone that makes a product feel like one thing, held across every screen.

Restraint over noise: a single voice in type, colour and composition, the same intent from the first frame to the last.

Setting the visual language and brand — identity, tone, the rules everything else follows.

Typographic hierarchy and rhythm: scale and weight doing the work, not ornament.

Colour with restraint — a near-monochrome base and one considered accent.

Composition and balance on a deliberate grid, with space used as a material.

Holding the direction consistent across every screen and state of the product.

— one visual system
ONE VISUAL LANGUAGE TYPE · COLOUR · GRID

Make a thing. Then make it again, better.

— THE WORKING THESIS
END OF SECTION TWO  ·  CONTINUE TO PROJECTS
On Purpose

I started BLink with Petar Kremenović because the city we live in still needed building a digitized public-transit system, a civic platform that closes the loop, ride-hailing tuned to a local market. A smart-city stack, plus founder tools nobody else was building. So we started a startup.

06 — startup

One startup,
five products.

Petar Kremenović and I founded blink in Banja Luka in 2024 — one startup building five products, each already live with its own users, all shipped by the same small team.

banja luka · since 2024

five products · 01

Urbano

civic infrastructure · live · Banja Luka · 2024

Municipal infrastructure for issue resolution.

Citizen reports once vanished into phone calls and paper forms. Urbano puts every one on a single map — geocoded, routed, and tracked from intake to close.

Next.jsSupabaseMapbox GL

Urbano dashboard — Banja Luka civic map with live reports
Banja Luka mapped as a civic infrastructure layer
Civic map layer Every transit stop, school and pharmacy mapped as a routing anchor — the spatial backbone that sends each report to the department that owns it.
0assets mapped
0reports resolved
0davg response
0/100accessibility
Anatomy of a bus-stop record — accessibility, routes, lighting, geolocation
Anatomy of a record — every stop carries accessibility, routes, lighting state and WGS84 coordinates.

From intake to close

  • Pin & photo intakeresidents file a geotagged report in seconds
  • Department routingeach report opens a tracked work order automatically
  • Public status timelineanyone follows a fix from filed to closed
Urbano mobile — geotagged report intake
five products · 02

BLBus

real-time transit · building · Banja Luka · 2024

BLBus live arrivals — Route 12, next arrival in 4 min

Real-time infrastructure for public transit.

Static schedules were wrong the day they were printed. BLBus streams verified vehicle positions off a live GTFS-realtime feed — the next arrival ticks down, then flips to LIVE.

React NativeGTFS-RTWebSocket

0routes live
0minmedian next arrival
0vehicles tracked
0paper timetables
BLBus live network — routes and vehicles streaming position
The live network Every vehicle on every route streaming position to a single GTFS-realtime feed — one source of truth the rider app and the dispatch board both read.
Anatomy of an arrival — countdown, route, frequency and crowding
Anatomy of an arrival — the next bus, its countdown, frequency and live crowding, read straight off the feed.

From guess to live

  • Live GTFS-realtimethe fleet streams position, not a printed guess
  • Countdown to LIVEthe next arrival ticks down, then turns live
  • Dispatch boardoperators see every route and vehicle at once
BLBus live route map, Borik to Centar
five products · 03

Djir

ride-hailing · live · Banja Luka · 2024

A ride-hailing platform engineered for regional markets.

Global ride apps assume card-only cities ten times our size. Djir runs cash and card through one booking flow, with fares you read before you book and a commission low enough that driving pays.

React NativeExpoNestJS

Djir driver app — incoming ride request, live route
Djir regional coverage — the streets it was built for
Built for the region One booking flow tuned to the streets it runs on — cash and card, capped fares, no imported surge model bolted on.
0KMbase fare, shown upfront
0minaverage pickup
0driver rating
0%request accept rate
Anatomy of a ride — fare, distance, duration and driver
Anatomy of a ride — the fare, distance, duration and driver are fixed and visible before the request is sent.

Tuned to the ground

  • Cash + cardboth payment paths run through one booking flow
  • Capped faresthe price is fixed and visible before you book
  • Driver-first economicsa low commission keeps more of the fare with the driver
Djir rider app — fare and vehicle class before booking
five products · 04

Jared

operational cli · preview · 2025

Operational tooling for independent founders.

Running a company alone means being the deploy engineer, the PM, and the person who writes the Friday update. Jared takes the recurring work — ships deploys, drafts status from your commits, runs the weekly review.

NodeClaude APICobra

Jared deploy session — tests, push, build, live
Jared deploy command output
01  Deploy — one command, run on itself first
Jared schedule command output
02  Schedule — the week laid out from your goals
Jared review command output
03  Review — progress measured against the plan
0shipped this week
0PRs merged
0%deploy health
0blocked items flagged
Anatomy of a deploy — checks, build steps and live URL
Anatomy of a deploy — git check, tests, build steps and the live URL, every release validated in-house first.

The recurring work, automated

  • One-command deploysship without remembering the runbook each time
  • Weekly reviewprogress checked against the goals you set
  • Status from gitupdates drafted straight from the week's commits
Jared weekly review — shipped, merged PRs, deploy health
five products · 05

Sinapsa

research platform · research · 2025

Sinapsa research workspace — cited answers across the corpus

An enterprise research and synthesis platform.

Reading across a stack of papers means holding every PDF in your head. Sinapsa indexes a corpus into a typed vector store, answers across all of it at once, and cites every claim back to the source.

PythonpgvectorFastAPI

Sinapsa corpus as a graph — sources, citations and relations
The corpus as a graph Every source, citation and relation in one navigable structure — the layer that lets an answer point back to the exact passage it came from.
0sources indexed
0relations mapped
0avg confidence
0thematic clusters
Anatomy of a cited answer — claim, confidence and source passage
Anatomy of a cited answer — each claim carries its confidence and links back to the exact source passage it was drawn from.

Grounded, not guessed

  • Corpus-wide answersask one question across the whole library
  • Cited to sourceevery claim links back to the passage it came from
  • Typed retrievala schema layer keeps generated answers grounded
Sinapsa citation graph — how sources interrelate

five products · banja luka · 2024 – 2026

On Persistence

A contribution graph is just colored squares until you read it as a calendar. Each square is a day something got built, fixed, or broken and rebuilt. The interesting part is not the streaks but the gaps the weeks spent reading, rethinking, or simply living. Consistency is not about never stopping. It is about always returning.

Shipping Since 13

Years of commits, experiments and shipped systems compressed into one field of work.

2020 -> now

Each square is roughly 4 days

2026 stops at today

Open GitHub
On Influence

Before the first function, there was a sentence. Dostoevsky taught that reason has limits. Kierkegaard, that the leap is the only honest move. Proust, that attention is the rarest form of generosity. Every book left a residue not knowledge, but posture. The way you hold a problem. The patience before the elegant solution. Code is written in languages, but thinking is shaped by literature.

The Books That Built This

Software is written in code, but the thinking behind it was shaped elsewhere.

Philosophy

Fear and Trembling

Søren Kierkegaard

The leap of faith as the founding gesture — analysis must yield to commitment.

Philosophy

Either/Or

Søren Kierkegaard

The aesthetic vs the ethical — every architecture is a choice between beauty and duty.

Philosophy

Beyond Good and Evil

Friedrich Nietzsche

Questioning inherited frameworks. The will to build something genuinely new.

Philosophy

Thus Spoke Zarathustra

Friedrich Nietzsche

Creation as the highest act. The discipline to become what you are.

Philosophy

Being and Nothingness

Jean-Paul Sartre

Radical freedom — you are condemned to choose, even in code.

Philosophy

The Myth of Sisyphus

Albert Camus

One must imagine the debugger happy. The absurd persistence of craft.

Literature

Notes from Underground

Fyodor Dostoevsky

The cellars of human psychology where logic dissolves into paradox.

Literature

In Search of Lost Time

Marcel Proust

Obsessive archaeology of memory. Attention as the rarest form of generosity.

Literature

The Immoralist

André Gide

The acte gratuit — liberation through authentic, uncommissioned action.

Literature

Beautiful Losers

Leonard Cohen

A crack in everything — ecstasy and ruin as twin engines of creation.

Literature

The Stranger

Albert Camus

The honesty of refusing to perform. Code that does exactly what it means.

Currently Reading

The Brothers Karamazov

Fyodor Dostoevsky

Faith, doubt, and the weight of free will — the novel as total philosophy.

40+ Books re-read
4 Languages read in
On Seeing

The eye learns before the hand. Every interface begins as a gaze a fraction of a second where the visitor decides: stay or leave. Beauty is not ornament. It is the shortest path to trust.

CorrespondenceXI / XII

Start adialogue

Quiet correspondence preferred. For anything urgent — a voice call cuts through faster than a thread.

Based Sarajevo, BIH
Timezone GMT +1 / CET
Reply Within 24h
Signed JJ — MMXXVI
05 Selected Projects · 04
01  /  04

Social Network Platform

A real-time social fabric where people who share a place can actually find each other — without surrendering their graph to an advertising machine.

1.4M sockets / day
sub-200ms p95
2024 Lead Mobile Live

Longi Commerce

A multi-brand commerce engine with an editorial soul — product storytelling and checkout ergonomics living in the same CMS, the same breath.

312K orders served
98.4% checkout reliability
2024 Full-Stack Enterprise

News Agency Portal

A headless newsroom built for journalists, not editors — sub-second publish, SEO-native architecture, reader-first pagination that respects attention.

2.7M monthly readers
40ms TTFB at edge
2023 Sr. Full-Stack Production

Analytics Dashboard

Real-time telemetry reshaped into a legible editorial interface — numbers read as paragraphs, charts behave as footnotes, decisions arrive in one glance.

48M events / day
sub-90ms query response
2024 Full-Stack Enterprise
View case study
Continue reading

concept 06 / waveform manuscript

Now listening

One song in focus, with a small trace of the rotation.

featured songs

now playing
SuzanneLeonard Cohen
most returned
Blue in GreenMiles Davis
late night
Pink MoonNick Drake
recent rotation
TezetaMulatu Astatke
Jovan Jevtić
Software of
Love and
Hate
Jovan Jevtić
Leonard Cohen
2025
01 / 06

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