Ruslan Ismailov

My name is Ruslan Ismailov, and for the last 9 years I have been doing server-side development — from small startups to systems handling thousands of requests per second. My main stack is PHP and Laravel for product logic and Go for high-performance microservices, almost always backed by PostgreSQL and Redis.

I started out as a fullstack developer, but soon realised that what I enjoy most is what happens “under the hood”: data models, consistency, queues, caching and an architecture that survives product growth without a rewrite from scratch. Over the years I have designed payment integrations, billing systems, data aggregators and real-time analytics, and led the migration of a monolith to a microservice architecture more than once.

My approach

I believe a good backend is, above all, predictable. Code should be easy to read, covered by tests and resilient to failures: idempotent operations, careful error handling and clear logging matter more than “clever” one-liners. I pay special attention to the boundaries of the system — API contracts, input validation and authorising every action, because that is where the most expensive mistakes usually happen.

When working with a database I assume the schema is the foundation. Thoughtful indexes, no N+1 queries and deliberate denormalisation pay off far more than spot optimisation after the fact. And to ship changes to production safely, I build CI/CD pipelines with automated tests, containerisation in Docker and orchestration in Kubernetes.

Principles

• Simplicity over cleverness — maintainable code saves months.
• Reliability by default: retries, idempotency, careful timeouts and backoffs.
• Data is a contract. Integrity and consistency are never sacrificed for speed.
• Observability: metrics and logs are built in from the start, not after the first incident.
• Documentation and tests are part of the “definition of done”, not a separate task.

How I can help

If you need to design an API from scratch, offload an overloaded database, bring order to queues and background jobs, or extract a bottleneck into a separate Go service — I will help you go from diagnosis to a working and maintainable solution. A detailed list of areas is on the services page.