A record of what shipped and what it moved — assembled from GitHub history across the
theinnercircle org and from Slack (#engineering, #back-end-team, #important-stuff, #pixintegration,
#product). Every figure below carries its source.
The briefcan you check Slack - mainly engineering and backend channels and theic repo history and compile a list of feature that I've been working on and figure out some achievements/impact that my work had on the company - increased revenue, performance, etc.?
theicTwo years of commits to theic master, as GitHub counts them.
Only outcomes with a number attached and a traceable source. Everything else lives in the chronology below.
Led the backend integration of PagBrasil / automated Pix — API client, webhooks, consent flow, payment links, recurring charges, refunds, subscription cancellation, micropayments. Brazil is the company's largest market (first €1M revenue month in Aug 2023; 79% of that month's growth).
Owned the DB Cleanup initiative end to end (Aug 2025 – Jan 2026): 587k already-deleted, 2.7M inactive non-approved and 1.23M inactive approved accounts, plus ~428M related rows, ~22.7M photos and 36 redundant indexes removed.
Direct consequence of the cleanup and index work, measured twice: 3.2 → 2.9 ms in Oct 2025, and a
consistent 3+ ms → 2.2 ms by Feb 2026 — at a sustained 381,321 transactions per minute on the
zf-backend service. At that throughput, a millisecond is not a rounding error.
The search platform you built from zero answers the average query in 130 ms, against MySQL queries it replaced that ran into the seconds. Delivered in three one-month phases — Foundation, Nearby widget, Wall/Matcher — each completed on schedule.
Full sync of ~1M searchable users in ~10 min, ~750K profile-field sets in ~5 min, ~460K lifestyle sets in ~7 min, and the ~2B-row likes subset (of a ~16B-row table) in ~1 week. Incremental sync keeps up with 500–5k modified users/min in under 5 s and 1–10k modified likes/min in under 10 s.
GET /likes went from a 383 ms one-month average to ~190 ms after a week of targeted backend
fixes. One of the most-hit screens in the app.
Removed a stale manually-forced index on the online-users query (PR #2813). Separately, found and fixed a missing cache on superlikes that had been costing ~200 ms on every request since launch.
GET /messages from 176 ms to 156 ms on quick fixes alone, with a deeper optimisation path
scoped but deliberately not taken.
Company high, hit the Sunday after the new registration flow landed. You built its entire backend:
/register, registration-state and config endpoints,
photo ordering, email verification.
Marketing couldn't use it. Fixed the query, split the Admin Panel onto separate read/write MySQL connections, and eliminated a recurring class of Sentry deadlocks in the process.
Three slides from the Q4 2024 all-hands deck (Week start, 25 Nov 2024) — useful because the framing isn't yours, it's how the project was reported to the whole company — plus the endpoint response times you measured and posted in #engineering.
zf-backend and a failed-transaction rate with no data to
display. This is the slide for anyone who thinks a millisecond doesn't matter: at this throughput, the ~1 ms
the cleanup took out is roughly six minutes of database time saved every minute of wall clock.
#back-end-team, 2026-02-09Average response time, production. Figures as stated in your #engineering posts of 2025-09-23 and 2025-10-22.
Grouped by year because the arc matters: growth plumbing → monetisation experiments → search platform → cleanup and modernisation → payments and service extraction.
Built and rolled out phone sign-up from a Brazil pilot (50 users) to global release — country gating, daily limits, brute-force detection, Danish number support, login-with-phone when the sign-up cap is hit.
Boost Bundles, Boost triggers and logging, shadow-boost A/B test, visibility improvements, city-by-city rollout (Bogotá, Santiago, Belo Horizonte, Brazil), regional price adjustments and discounts, GA event reporting, admin stop-button and filters.
Wall caching, combined online/offline queries, static Memcached, user-by-PK caching, and moving frequently-modified user fields into Redis with a sync-back job — a multi-attempt project that cut write pressure on the users table.
Dispatching SNS events from the monolith, ramped 1% → 100% behind a percentage gate, with schema work and a PHP 8 rewrite of the event builder.
End-to-end: invite codes, static code generation for existing users, the invite webpage, send-invite screen, code-grants-free-membership, custom App Store product pages for invited members, tracking, and retirement of the old app/web code paths.
Effectively became the owner of the experiments framework — new filter categories, participation visibility in the Admin Panel, support for enrolling existing users, plan handling, and systematic cleanup of expired experiments.
Weekly subscriptions (BR, AR, MX, NL, AMS), iOS price increases, Android price decreases, Colombia and Argentina adjustments, Paid-Only App (its own multi-month project: plans, paywalls, permissions, discover, profile and membership slides), Limited Time Offers for less-active users.
Open Messages, Photo Prompts, Interactable Profile Fields, Lifestyle details, Five Tabs, Liked You / You Liked lists, combined Matches & Messages, Invisible + Protected mode, unblurring one like, Superlikes.
Stopped a live phone-sign-up registration attack — killed active sessions, added brute-force detection, and staged the safe re-enable of phone sign-up country by country.
The dominant project of the year and largely yours: the OpenSearch PHP client, the SearchSync service, sync commands for users, likes, lifestyles, deleted users and orphaned likes, retriable sync jobs, geo-point mapping, Sentry instrumentation, and a documented runbook. Two sync regimes — periodic for users, likes, profile fields and lifestyles; real-time for newly approved, deleted, and users flipping searchable/unsearchable.
Online → Nearby → New wall widgets, then match recommendations, migrated off MySQL one at a time behind admin-only and percentage gates, with rollbacks when a step misbehaved. By the Q4 update, OpenSearch was serving all wall widgets and match recommendations.
Phase 1 Foundation, Phase 2 Nearby widget and Phase 3 Wall/Matcher each landed in their one-month slot; Phase 4 (profile fields, lifestyles) followed. "Finish the OpenSearch technical foundation" was a named key initiative under the company's Q4 Lifestyles objective — the widget rework and lifestyle features the quarter was built around all depended on it landing.
Two challenges called out publicly: indexing the ~2B relevant rows out of a ~16B-row likes table, and absorbing the traffic shape change after app v5.10. The peak-load work under the latter fed straight into the 2025 reliability fixes.
New email template system, platform filters for push and email, CRM triggers for registration, new user categories, the internal screening service and its admin dashboard, manual-screening countries, photo hashing and duplicate detection.
SNS events moved to RabbitMQ, DataTap and savelike moved to background jobs, Symfony Cache introduced, the config object wrapper, Rector-driven PHP 7.3 → 8.3 typing, Amplitude deprecated.
Started 1 Aug 2025, closed Jan 2026. See Section 01 — this is the single largest measurable infrastructure win in the record.
Backend for the whole feature: network model and statuses, invite codes, banners, network wall, deeplink endpoint, CRM categories, translations, and the Lifestyle Sentences rollout city by city.
When OpenSearch started dropping requests at peak, added a circuit breaker, fallback distance queries, removed fuzziness, capped fallback ranges, and cut the query load — after diagnosing that users hitting the grey error screen were queue-drop victims.
Replaced Bugsnag with Sentry across the monolith, removed New Relic, moved to Monolog, added Elastic APM. Then used it: the Likes and Messages endpoint wins in Section 01 both came out of Sentry data.
/register,
registration state, config endpoint, photo delete/replace, webhooks client and server, Android payment
instalments.
Roughly 25 PRs from API client to full production release — webhooks, consent handling, pending/rejected charge states, duplicate-transaction prevention, refunds, cancel-on-delete, discounted renewals, micropayments. Also the one who caught the Android instalment mispricing bug (1,775 users on 3-month plans, 617 on 6-month) and escalated it.
Outbox pattern and migration, event-schema codegen, RabbitMQ produce and consume in the monolith, SNS/SQS bus decommissioned, background jobs refactored, queues moved to Redis Cluster.
Daily Picks (backend + OpenSearch scoring), Date Coin consumable, buy-screen, home-screen section, feature toggle, admin granting, and the pairing algorithm RFC for Date at Eight.
Schema design for members and restrictions, real resolvers behind the API gateway, session validation — the work that lets the mobile apps stop talking to ZF1 directly.
FrankenPHP + Octane, the local Docker topology for the Kotlin
services, consolidated dev stack, backend API testing script, per-environment .env, Composer
security audit.
Areas where the history shows sustained ownership rather than a single contribution — the useful framing for a review or a promotion case.
| Area | Span | Evidence |
|---|---|---|
| Monetisation & payments | 2022 – 2026 | Boost economy → pricing experiments → Paid-Only App → Android instalments → PagBrasil/Pix → Date Coin |
| Search platform | 2024 – 2026 | OpenSearch client, sync layer, every widget cutover, reliability work, Daily Picks scoring |
| Database health | 2024 – 2026 | Cleanup initiative, index removal, slow-query work, read/write splitting, latency tracking |
| A/B testing & CRM segmentation | 2022 – 2026 | Experiments framework, user categories, IAA/push/email filters, NAM-delay targeting |
| Registration & auth | 2022 – 2026 | Phone sign-up, attack response, email verification, the v5 registration flow backend |
| Observability | 2024 – 2026 | Bugsnag → Sentry, New Relic removal, Monolog, Elastic APM, and using the data to find wins |
| Admin Panel | 2023 – 2026 | Filament migration support, MFA, seeders, ACL and role scoping, performance fixes |
| Modernisation | 2023 – 2026 | PHP 7.1 → 8.3, Symfony Cache, RabbitMQ, outbox, FrankenPHP, GraphQL gateway, service extraction |