Hello, I'm
UlaJohnson
Software engineer · Writer · Tinkerer
Building things, breaking things, and writing them down.
About
A little about me
I'm a software engineer working on back-end systems in the payments space. I like code that is easy to read, systems that are easy to operate, and teams that share what they know.
Day to day I build and look after services that need to be reliable. That means caring about the unglamorous parts: logging that answers questions during an incident, tests people trust, and pipelines that keep the main branch green.
Outside of work I tinker with side projects, read far too many engineering blogs and write up the interesting things I stumble on.
Things I work with
- Java
- Spring Boot
- TypeScript
- Node.js
- RabbitMQ
- Couchbase
- Docker
- AWS
Interests
Things I'm into
The topics I keep coming back to, at work and outside it.
- 01
Back-end systems
Services that stay calm under load, and the messaging that ties them together.
- 02
Developer experience
Tooling, pipelines and documentation that make the right thing the easy thing.
- 03
Testing
Test suites people actually trust, from fast unit tests to a thin end-to-end layer.
- 04
Learning in public
Notes on whichever rabbit hole I happen to be down this month.
Projects
Things I've built
A mix of side projects, experiments and tools.
ulajohnson.dev
This site. Built with Astro, with no client-side framework and a little heather purple.
Astro · TypeScript · CSS
Side project
A short sentence about something you built, what problem it solves and what you learned.
Java · Spring Boot
Experiment
A tool, library or weekend hack worth showing off. Link it to the repo or a live demo.
Node.js · CLI