Michael Nikitochkin
Berlin, Germany
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolMichael Nikitochkin is a pragmatic site reliability and backend engineer with 17 years of experience designing resilient systems and leading teams across startups and large platforms like Shopify and Zalando. He blends hands-on expertise in Ruby on Rails, Golang and Crystal with cloud-native orchestration (Kubernetes, Mesos) to build microservice architectures and hybrid cloud deployments that prioritize reliability and developer comfort. As an incident commander and Management 3.0 practitioner he focuses on making business owners and teams feel secure while driving continuous improvement. His open-source contributions include improvements to Shopify projects such as toxiproxy and semian, highlighting a focus on chaos testing and failure-first resiliency. Comfortable shipping both product features and DevOps automation, he pairs deep low-level work (time handling, CI optimizations, linters) with product-minded design. Based in Berlin with a background in applied mathematics, he brings a methodical, simplicity-first approach to complex distributed systems.
17 years of coding experience
17 years of employment as a software developer
Specialist, Mathematics, Applied Mathematics, Specialist, Mathematics, Applied Mathematics at Donetsk National University
English, Russian, Ukrainian, German
Stackoverflow
328reputation
48kreached
10answers
1question
Github Skills (47)
ruby-rails10
debug10
github-ci10
middleware10
circuit-breaker10
testing10
rails10
cicd10
plugin10
ruby10
go10
resiliency10
activerecord10
shell10
githubaction-workflow10
Programming languages (21)
Github contributions (5)
Shopify/toxiproxy
Aug 2021 - Sep 2022
:alarm_clock: :fire: A TCP proxy to simulate network and system conditions for chaos and resiliency testing
Role in this project:
Back-end & DevOps Engineer
Back-end & DevOps EngineerContributions:55 reviews, 84 commits, 107 PRs in 1 year 1 month
Contributions summary:Michael primarily contributed to the `toxiproxy-cli` tool, addressing argument parsing and documentation issues. They added end-to-end tests using a benchmark script, automating the testing process with GitHub Actions. Additionally, the user implemented a linter to enforce a maximum line length and formatted files using golines.
chaosclockconditionssimulateproxy
Shopify/semian
May 2022 - Jan 2023
:monkey: Resiliency toolkit for Ruby for failing fast
Role in this project:Back-end Developer & DevOps Engineer
Back-end Developer & DevOps EngineerContributions:8 releases, 52 reviews, 70 commits in 8 months
Contributions summary:Michael primarily contributed to the resilience toolkit's backend functionality and performance. They focused on improving the project's test infrastructure by replacing container tests with GitHub Action container services and enabling parallel test execution. The user also optimized the codebase by replacing `Time` with `CLOCK_MONOTONIC` for more efficient time-based operations and refactored tests by cleaning unused parts and updating assertions. They also made CI/CD improvements, adding a linter and ensuring compatibility with Shopify's Ruby style guidelines.
circuit-breakerwebscalerailsresiliencymonkey
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