Stefan Novak
Stefan Novak
Software Engineer
Hi! I'm a software developer, primarily a .NET Developer with strong experience in mobile development too. This is my website, written using NextJS 13 and Mantine. The best way to contact me is to send me a message on LinkedIn.
.NET Developer
.NET is my bread and butter skill when it comes to software. I've got 3 years professional experience using it, as well as using Azure and their various services. SQL Server, CosmosDB NoSQL, I have no problems working with databases, creating them, creating architectural diagrams to plan a system, all the usual software engineering stuff. Azure is also my cloud provider of choice, simply because of the natural synergy with .NET. I of course strive to write clean, fully test driven code using SOLID principles. I've worked on a variety of projects, including e-commerce, an API to facilitate Unity, a blockchain specific API, user authentication using both .NET Identity and social media logins, and more. xUnit and Moq, NSubstitute on occassion, SignalR, Entity Framework, Message Buses, REST, I've worked with all of these technologies and concepts, and more.
About me
I've finally finished a 6 year part time degree in Computing this year, so I've been using my free time to create projects such as this website. I'm currently learning Elixir and I'm loving it.
Outside of work, I'm a DM for two Dungeons and Dragons groups, and play in a number of other ones. I'm learning Spanish, I love to cook, and I of course play games whenever I get the time, Civilization 5 and Valorant being my favourites at the moment. I'm also a big fan of Rafael Nadal and follow tennis closely. I listen to Deftones daily.
Projects
Nectarine API
Nectarine is my ASP.NET Web Core API project that I have been working on for two years, on and off, whenever I got some free time to work on it. It's an e-commerce API, featuring Google, Microsoft and Facebook sign in, as well as using .NET's Identity solution. It uses Entity Framework, using a PostgreSQL database that I've hosted on Fly.io. It also has a Stripe checkout flow, Stripe is quite integral to this API. It was written following Test Driven Development which I always strive to do, boasting 100% coverage on both the Controllers and the Services. It also used SendGrid to send emails for user sign up and order confirmation, as well as Twilio for SMS messaging for two factor authentication, but no longer does due to my inactive account and difficulties getting that going again (pretty bad customer service). It was once hosted on Azure but there were small costs to it, so I moved it to Fly.io, where I don't have to pay anything.
There is a whole checklist of things I want to do with this API, but I'm not sure if I'll ever get around to it just because of time commitments. I want to add a NextJS front end to it, as well as a Flutter mobile app. I began work on both of these things but they won't be ready for the public for a long time. I'm planning to continue work on this throughout the years, adding feature by feature slowly until I have a fully working e-commerce API ready to go. It's also an interesting project for me personally, as I get to see my growth throughout the years. There are several things in the code that I would not do nowadays.
Feel free to check out the code on GitHub or play around with the API yourself on the Swagger page! The Swagger page may take a while to load, the machines hosting the API are asleep when not used.