Welcome to Luka's personal website!
Here I talk about my experiences with tech, as well as present my career path, projects, and hobbies.
Check out my blog, as well as my personal milestones, which lists my completed and active goals for the future.
Projects
HexName
After 4.5 months of work, I'm proud to finally announce the launch of my project HexName, the backend/frontend/infrastructure of which I built on my own.
When learning about homelabbing and DNS, I tested out many free DDNS services - none of which I'd recommend nowadays. Because of the lack of better alternatives, and for learning purposes, I decided to build a reliable, forever-free alternative I can confidently recommend to others. After 4.5 months, I finally finished the backend, frontend, and deployed my app to the public.
Check out my blog where I talk about developing HexName in detail!
EMBArk - Django-UI for Siemens Energy
Open source university project in cooperation with Siemens Energy: Further development of a Python web UI for managing firmware analyses via SSH workers in a team, with a focus on agile methodologies.
Our student team had multiple weekly meetings in which we discussed the future of the project and prioritized tickets. We also had mandatory reviews for each pull-request which helped uphold a high standard of code-quality.
Server administration of network systems with NixOS
Here I'm managing infrastructure declaratively with reproducible deployments across machines, integrating Cloudflare, Netbird/Tailscale mesh VPNs, NAT/CGNAT traversal, ZFS storage, monitoring, and secrets management via sops.
I improved mail deliverability and security by operating a self-hosted mail server with SPF/DKIM/DMARC policies, MTA-STS, email reputation management, and DNS hardening
This is currently my main hobby. Started in 2024, now I rely on many of these services. I also run a server for my parents which they use for media storage as well as QoL improvements like cloud-printing. This server is also used as a remote backup.
With this, my journey to degoogle my life and rely less on external services started.
File archiver in C
Archives/extracts files in its own format using Huffman coding. Implements multi-stage compression for a minimal file size. Programmed without external dependencies or libraries.
This was done to learn about Huffman coding and different file compression techniques. I also had to come up with my own format to overcome the challenges of storing data in bits instead of bytes (as per the algorithm).
Career
Infrastructure Software Engineer – Dilax Intelcom
Designed and built a custom application-agnostic reverse-proxy embedded in a Java/Spring Boot app that routes requests to network-isolated sensors via URL-based rules, eliminating the need for 1000+ device-specific configurations while enforcing centralized authentication.
Built and operated deployment automation for 60+ Linux hosts, including SSH-based rollout tooling, improving infrastructure reliability and repeatability across production systems.
Implemented fleet-wide monitoring with Prometheus, Grafana, covering per-service state and proactive alerting.
Junior Backend Engineer Internship – Talkpal Inc.
Improved reliability of email scheduling services by optimizing Redis queues in a NestJS microservices backend while diagnosing and resolving PostgreSQL-related failures across API workflows.
Improved maintainability of 20-30 NestJS API endpoints by refactoring large handlers into smaller service modules with clearer responsibilities and more testable boundaries.
Information Technology Support Specialist – Cura Unternehmensgruppe GmbH
Support with network and user administration, hardware maintenance and management, automation, and documentation in the IT field.
I gained invaluable people-skills, as well as further developed my logical reasoning.