Hello, I'm
Nikola Ćurić Full Stack Web Developer
Building fast and scalable apps with PHP on the backend and Nuxt on the frontend. Let's turn ideas into reliable digital products.
- Years shipping
- 7+
- Core stack
- PHP · Go · Java
- Focus
- Backend
Capabilities
What I do
Five areas I cover end to end, from the schema up to the deployment pipeline.
Databases
Database design and schema modelling with proper normalisation. Optimised, fast queries able to process large amounts of data.
Backend
Fast and scalable application backends — PHP first, with Go and Java where the workload suits them — plus safe, secure API design and integration with external tools and systems, following SOLID principles.
Frontend
Responsive and user-friendly interfaces with Nuxt and TypeScript, using reusable components and Tailwind-based design systems, built around UX, accessibility and modern standards.
DevOps
Robust and automated deployment to dedicated servers using Docker, CI/CD pipelines and secure SSH workflows — with ongoing updates and server maintenance for stability and optimal performance.
Domains & email
Administration of reliable and secure domains and email accounts with proven providers, mailbox scaling and cleanup, and SSL certificate management.
Why it holds up
Technology depth, and the business rules underneath it
Frameworks change every few years. What carries over is knowing how a domain actually behaves and how to keep it correct under load.
Across insurance, e-commerce, booking, fitness and hosting, the hard part has rarely been the framework. It has been the rules: what a renewal does when a payment fails halfway, which states an order may legally move between, what happens to a domain when a registrar API times out after it has already accepted the request.
I model that before I write handlers. Invariants live in the domain, not scattered across controllers; state transitions are explicit and testable; the edge cases the business cares about are named in the code rather than discovered in production. When a requirement is ambiguous, I go back to the people who own it instead of guessing — that single habit has prevented more defects than any tool.
PHP with Symfony, Mezzio and Laminas remains my sharpest tool and where I go deepest, and Go and Java sit alongside it where the workload calls for them. Around that: PostgreSQL and MySQL schemas designed to be normalised and fast, Redis and Elasticsearch where reads must be instant, Kafka and RabbitMQ for work that must survive a restart, and Docker and Kubernetes because code that only runs on my machine is not finished.
- Production systems delivered in insurance, e-commerce, booking, HR, technical documentation and web hosting.
- Features owned end to end — schema, API, frontend and deployment — not handed over at the first boundary.
- SOLID structure, code review, CI/CD and bi-weekly sprints as the default way of working, not an afterthought.
Domain modelling
I turn business rules into explicit models and state machines, so the logic is readable, testable and hard to violate by accident.
PHP first, polyglot when it pays
Deepest in PHP and its ecosystem, with Go and Java where concurrency, throughput or an existing platform makes them the better fit.
Built to hold up
Indexed, normalised schemas, queries measured rather than guessed, caching and queues placed where they actually remove load.
Delivered, not just written
Comfortable with stakeholders, code review and release pressure — from daily stand-ups to production rollouts behind CI/CD.
Toolbox
Experienced with
Programming languages
- PHPfocus
- Go
- Java
- TypeScript
- JavaScript
Frameworks
- Symfony
- MezzioSwoole
- Laminas / Zend
- Spring Boot
- Nuxt 4
- Vue 3
- Tailwind CSS
SQL databases
- PostgreSQL
- MySQL
- MariaDB
NoSQL databases
- Elasticsearch
- MongoDB
- Redis
Version control
- Git
- GitLab
- Bitbucket
- GitHub
- Git
Message brokers
- RabbitMQ
- Beanstalk
Event streaming
- Apache Kafka
Deployment tools
- Jenkins
- Bamboo
Working environments
- Linux
- Docker
- Kubernetes
Career
Work experience
Working through DevTech as an outsourced engineer for Dogado GmbH — part of group.one, one of Europe's largest web presence and hosting groups. The work sits on a platform that thousands of customers depend on daily, so correctness, backwards compatibility and careful rollouts matter more than raw speed of delivery.
Two areas carry most of my work there:
- Hosting platform & control panel: Building and maintaining customer-facing account management and the services behind it — provisioning, resource limits and the automation that keeps plans, upgrades and cancellations consistent between the control panel and the underlying infrastructure.
- Domains, DNS and SSL: Domain registration, transfers and renewals against registrar APIs, DNS record management, and issuing and renewing SSL certificates — a domain full of asynchronous state, third-party failure modes and rules that must never silently drop a customer's domain.
Background
Education
Bachelor of Science, Mechanical Engineer
University of Defence
09.2015 — 06.2019
Selected work
Projects
All representative projects I have worked on so far are privately owned and their code is not publicly available. Most of them also have no public web address and can only be reached inside a specific organisation or through a suitable VPN connection.