Mārtiņš Pilsētnieks is a seasoned CTO based in Riga with over 15 years building web and mobile messaging systems, leading products that scale from small sites to projects serving millions. He combines hands-on development and infrastructure know-how—especially networking and datacenter gear—with long-term leadership at Sales.lv and prior R&D and consulting roles. Comfortable across the stack, he has contributed backend improvements to open-source tooling such as a PHP spreadsheet reader, fixing file-type detection and edge-case data bugs. His background blends formal programming study with a BA in Sociology, giving him both technical depth and a people-centered perspective on product design. Pragmatic and curious, he still enjoys tinkering with everything from hobbyist projects to enterprise systems. This mix of operational experience and low-level debugging skill makes him effective at turning messy real-world problems into reliable production solutions.
15 years of coding experience
6 years of employment as a software developer
BA, Sociology, BA, Sociology at Latvijas Universitate
A PHP spreadsheet reader (Excel XLS and XLSX, OpenOffice ODS, and variously separated text files) with a singular goal of getting the data out, efficiently
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Contributions:81 commits, 7 PRs, 7 pushes in 3 years 4 months
Contributions summary:Mārtiņš primarily contributed to the development and improvement of a PHP spreadsheet reader. Their work focused on implementing preliminary support for OpenDocument Spreadsheet (ODS) files. They also addressed file type detection bugs and fixed issues related to missing data in XLS files. Furthermore, the user added the `php-excel-reader` library to facilitate testing and corrected a bug related to UTF-16 CSV files.
Contributions:6 releases, 12 PRs, 6 pushes in 8 years
api-clientapi
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