Saša Sladić

Saša co-founded Oktopeak and runs it. He also still writes and reviews backend code, which is less common than it sounds for someone in the chair, and it is the reason the company has not drifted into selling work it cannot deliver.

His specialism is architecture that has to satisfy two masters at once: it has to scale, and it has to survive an audit. Those pull in different directions. Fast systems cache aggressively and log lightly. Auditable systems log everything and can prove who touched what. Building something that does both without becoming slow or unmaintainable is the actual problem in regulated software, and it is where most of his attention goes.

Day to day that means backend services, data modelling, and the infrastructure underneath, mostly Laravel, PostgreSQL and AWS. The standing constraint on all of it is that the client has to be able to take the system over and run it. Nothing ships that stays up only because we are the ones operating it, which rules out a whole category of shortcuts that would otherwise be tempting on a fixed-price build.