Gustavo Karkow

Gustavo Karkow

Software Engineer in Montréal

I'm a generalist/full-stack engineer with ten years of experience. Working at Digicast, I've been building icastGo, a next-gen webcasting and live events platform.

I'm interested in projects using PHP, Laravel, JavaScript, TypeScript, Vue, React, Inertia, Tailwind CSS, Event Sourcing, XState, AWS, Cloudflare, MySQL, PostgreSQL, and SQLite (not an exhaustive list by any means).

Work Experience

2023 — Now
Montréal
  • Steering technical decisions of next-gen webcast and live events platform icastGo

  • Ongoing development of Events (conferences, workshops, virtual tables, sports tournaments, ticketing, etc)

  • Ongoing development of advanced voting features including viewer segmentation, vote weights, and pre-voting

2020 — 2023
Montréal
  • Documented core business logic implementation for every major project

  • Provided technical guidance to peers

  • Refactored the core of Webcasts to use Event Sourcing, improving system reliability and maintainability

  • Delivered Meetings, a virtual meetings solution built into icastGo

  • Wrote 20+ state machines for complex UX interactions

  • Set up CI/CD pipeline for automating tests and deployments

  • Wrote tests bringing the coverage up from nil to 30%, including load testing virtual meetings infrastructure

  • Reviewed 500+ merge requests

2017 — 2020
2014 — 2017
Santa Maria, RS, Brazil

Projects

Ongoing

[WIP] Easy bitmasks in Laravel.

2024
Enhanced viewer experience at Digicast

Revamped icastGo's Webcast UI/UX to include resizable content panes, keyboard shortcuts, and an improved voting experience including multiple choice polls, voting progress, ability to modify votes, and open/closed states.

2024
Tinkering sessions at Digicast

I started an every-other-week tinkering session where developers work on fun stuff, do some pairing, and learn something new.

Rocket animation was its first byproduct. It was created using GSAP.

2023
Load testing at Digicast

Script for stress testing virtual meeting room infrastructure. The figure shows dummy media connections spawned by it.

Written using Playwright and Artillery. Deployed into AWS spot instances.

2023
Multimedia settings at Digicast

The multimedia settings component is used to select media devices and control the volume for different activities the user is interacting with.

Written using Vue and XState.

2022
Code reviews at Digicast

Get a sense of what I try to convey during code reviews — direct and actionable feedback.

2022

A bitmask value object for PHP.

2022

Minimal PDF to image converter using MuPDF.

2021
Coding style at Digicast

Get a feel for my coding style in this contained class example.

Actual dependencies and domain-specific logic have been obscured.

Side Projects

Ongoing

Pair programming with Internet strangers. An initiative started by @benholmen in the Laravel community.

Let's pair 🤝

2024

When you forget it's your day in the kitchen, all is not lost!

2024

Don't know what to wear in this weather? No problemo!

2024

Send your domain wishes to Domain Santa!

2024

Bluesky firehose as The Matrix source code. Featured in val.town Newsletter #22.

2024
fav

Turn an emoji into an SVG favicon.

2024
gksh

A terminal-like app on the web that briefly details my profile and experiences.

Written using Laravel, Vue, and Inertia.

2022
Office desk

Not really a Laravel developer until you make that DIY wood project.

2019

Web scrapper for filtering Kijiji rent listings based on budget and distance to commutes.

2018

Explorer app that shows places to go near your location.

Certifications

2018
Test d’évaluation de Français from Paris Ile-de-France CCI

Compréhension orale: C1

Expression orale: B2

Contact

GitHub
Twitter
LinkedIn