About

Hi there! 👋

My name is Arunas, and I'm a freelance developer specialising on Laravel, Vue.js, and TailwindCSS, with a little DevOps sprinkled on the side. I help companies improve their product by planning, working on the business angle and how the product can make more money, and then implementing ideas, them being performant, reliable, secure, and fully tested.

I have been professionally developing web applications since 2016 and I am the author of a popular open-source tool Log Viewer for Laravel, Spike - the billing portal for Laravel, and a few other smaller projects.

2016 // First job - C#, .Net Core, Angular 1.x

Straight after the bootcamp I've landed a job as a Junior Frontend Developer. A completely new and terrifying environment: C# language, .Net Core and Angular 1.x frameworks, none of which I have ever laid my eyes on before applying for the job. Regardless, I learnt quick and soon became a valuable team member. I have learnt a lot from the experience over there. Shipping real production code which thousands of real people use was a completely different feeling from what I did just just a few weeks ago in the bootcamp.

2017 // Second job - Windows forms, Laravel, Vue.js, Prestashop

Few months passed by and I got invited to join a company my friend was working at. The C# knowledge I had gained proved useful - developing a native Windows app from scratch was my first assignment. New tasks and new challenges! I love learning, and I loved my new job. Later, I was able to jump onto their internal systems and that's the first time I laid my eyes on Laravel. Love at first sight, I'm telling you! From that moment on, I promised myself to stick to it and become the best I can. A lot of Laravel projects are also built with Vue.js as the frontend, which also seemed like a breath of fresh air compared to Angular 1.x or jQuery. They go hand-in-hand very well and so became my choice of frameworks for any future side projects.

2018 // Going remote

Long before I was working as a developer full-time, I dreamed of working remotely on a laptop, sitting in a café somewhere sunny. Well, it happened! A couple of years of working 9-5 in an office has finally paid off and I got myself a full-time job as a freelancer in 2018 at a Danish company called EasyPractice, working on a SaaS product.

Laravel and Vue.js was their choice of frameworks, so I immediately fit in and contributed from day one! Working remotely has been a completely different experience with a brand new set of challenges.

2021 // Becoming Technical Team Lead

In May, 2021, I have worked at EasyPractice for nearly 3 years. I have accumulated a lot of knowledge and responsibilities, and I was already helping my team and the product a lot. That's when I was offered to become a Team Lead for our technical, backend-focused team of developers.

Once again, it brought a whole new set of challenges and skills to learn - project management, interviewing candidates, team meetings, etc.

What is this blog about?

In this blog I share my learnings and experiences from being a Laravel/VueJS developer, as well as some DevOps (server management, operations) which I also do quite a bit of in my daily job. Hopefully, you'll find my content helpful. Don't forget to subscribe below to hear more about my new learnings, tips and tricks.

I am currently building Spike - an all-in-one billing portal with credit management, and Log Viewer - the free and beautiful viewer for your Laravel logs. Check these out and let me know what you think!

Thanks for reading and I hope you have a wonderful journey becoming a better developer yourself!