Projects & Experience

From bare metal to the cloud, building platforms that scale.

Side projects I've shipped, infrastructure I've built professionally, and the tools I reach for. I like working across the full stack — from Kubernetes clusters and CI pipelines to the UIs that sit on top.

Infrastructure

Source GitHub

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CI / CD GitHub Actions

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Registry GHCR

DNS Cloudflare — *.nilow.space

Hetzner Cloud — k3s Cluster

Traefik Ingress

portfolio .nilow.space

heat .nilow.space

nickade .nilow.space

ear .nilow.space

grafana .nilow.space

cert-manager sealed-secrets prometheus kube-prometheus-stack

Server provisioned with a custom Terraform module — handles Hetzner Cloud server, SSH keys, and volume attachment.

Projects

Faceit Heat

CS2 match analysis and performance tracking for FACEIT players. Django app backed by PostgreSQL, with parallel API fetching and caching for fast results. Deployed on k3s with sealed secrets and CI/CD.

Live site → Source →

Nickade

Browser game arcade with six mini-games — reaction time, number memory, chimp test, and more. FastAPI backend with runtime game discovery, React frontends compiled to static assets.

Live site → Source →

Ear Trainer

Interactive music theory trainer built with React and TypeScript. Five exercises — interval recognition, chord identification, scale identification, chord progressions, and rhythm copycat.

Live site → Source →

Algorithms

Python and C++ solutions to competitive programming problems across LeetCode and Codeforces.

LeetCode → Codeforces →

Professional experience

Kubernetes & Infrastructure

Led the architecture of an AKS deployment for a data platform. Scaled HPC ADAS simulations on Kubernetes. Deployed and managed clusters across bare metal with self-managed networking, AKS in Azure, and k3s on Hetzner — fully self-hosted with Grafana monitoring, end to end. Deployed self-hosted Azure DevOps agents on AKS with KEDA-based autoscaling.

Terraform & IAM

Authored Terraform modules covering a large portion of azurerm resources for a data platform — databases, networking, compute, and storage. Configured access management across the stack: managed identities, service principals, RBAC role assignments, and Entra ID integration. Contributed to a self-service developer platform built on Backstage.

CI/CD & Automation

Built GitHub Actions pipelines for automated container builds and deployments. Wrote PowerShell automation pipelines for database provisioning — configuring SQL database roles, incorporating Entra groups into Azure SQL, and building workarounds to fetch object IDs and transcode them into SQL hex for principal mapping.