Hello, I am Igor

Hi there. I am Igor, a PHP/Web developer with passion and pride for what I do. I was born and raised in Slovakia - a small landlocked country in central Europe. When I reached the age of 26 I moved to Ireland, where I earned Bachelor degree in Business Information Systems. After the graduation I started playing with the idea of moving south. So after seven years spent on Emerald Island I moved to Australia where I started my degree at University of Western Sydney. I successfully graduated and earned Masters degree in Information and Communication Technology. The years at UWS were the toughest I have ever experienced. Not because of school but mostly because of having 2 casual jobs and a full time study. The great advantage I had against the other classmates was that I already knew most of what we were taught.

My biggest hobby are computers and Internet. I love everything about web and web technologies. I love exploring new ways and approaches for improving web site functionality, security, speed and user experience. I usually spend long hours on doing what I love to do (my record so far is over 40 hours with short breaks for making coffee, lol). Web development is not just a job but more like a hobby for me. I love when I get stuck with some unsolvable issue and keep torturing my brain by thinking how to solve it until I find the proper solution. The feeling once I solve such issue is priceless.

I like to travel. During time spent in Europe I visited almost all European countries, except for Scandinavia. In Australia I was lucky and I landed a job with employer who allows me from time to time to work remotely. And that is the time which I like to spend somewhere in South East Asia. The change of climate and place usually boost my productivity. Also my own time management plays a big role. To work when you feel like you want to, instead of when you have to, is definitely a very strong success factor to properly and effectively accomplish job for everyone.

I created my very first website sometimes in 1997 with Netscape Composer. It never went online but gave me good overview how things work. Even better overview I gained by creating another website sometimes in 1999 using Trellix web. It didn't take long to discover a lot of duplicate code generated by WYSIWYG (as every WYSIWYG does) and that discovery made me want to clean it and leave only parts which are really necessary. To shrink HTML file size by 60%, when mostly dial up modem connection was available was a great speed improvement.

Clean up of WYSIWYG mess, countless trials and errors by removing part of HTML code and checking what has changed learned me more than just a basics of HTML and after few months i decided to rewrite the whole website from a scratch without help of any WYSIWYG. These were also days when I used WYSIWYG editor for the last time and started writing HTML with plain text editor.

In the early 2000s came into game PHP and MySQL and shortly after also CSS. My very first experience with PHP was setting up a script which was logging visitor's IP addres and other relevant data into MySQL database. Later in 2003-2004 I started discovering PHP-Nuke, probably the best CMS of it's times and it's enhanced derivate - PHP-Nuke Platinum. Working with PHP-Nuke gave me solid knowledge of PHP & MySQL and enough confidence to work with any PHP based project.

Sometimes in 2010-2011 I started working with MODx - not very widely used, but in my opinion probably the most flexible Web Development Platform ever created. In the same time I started experimenting also with Wordpress, Joomla and Drupal, but none of these seem to me as flexible as MODx. Beside these major CMSes I also played around with Social Engine, PHP BB, VBulletin and many other more or less known platforms.

In 2015 while working for a company providing services for Working Holidays visa holders I was assigned a task to develop a web application allowing to communicate with the database of customers, with membership area, and live updates between the membership area and the database which was also used by internal custom developed CRM. Since the administration part (CRM) used by 6 offices in 3 countries was all custom coded, I found it easiest to create also a custom made CMS which perfectly fit all requirements.

I never stopped working on my custom CMS started in 2015 and currently it is roofing 10 websites with over 60 000 registered users (August 2020). It has a lot of automation processes, API connections to various services like Google Cloud, Webmaster Tools, Analytics, Ads, Adsense, Cloudflare, Vultr and many others. Include almost 70 custom developed modules for various purposes. My experience over the two decades since web development became my hobby is as follows