Martin Kask

My journey began when I became interested in beating the game. Everything started with curiosity. Soon enough, I dappled around with C++, not knowing what I'm doing. My goal at that time was to develop a hack for a game named Warrock. Once in awhile in every server, there was a hacker who could throw a grenade and kill everyone on the opposite team. I puzzled for a long time, how could this even be possible. 

After many weeks of being a full-time scholar and digging around in forums, I found a D3D code skeleton. With small additions, It was ready for testing. Only needed to build the C++ code as hooks for successful injection were already in place: only things required to be added menu painting and actual code behind the scene. Sorry, I already went too deep with the story, it still excites me tho, where curiosity may lead.

My professional career started in 2014 when I went to school to get a bachelors degree in software development. I worked fulltime job, partly remote where I began with software test automation and shortly moved to develop Java full time. Most of our clients were Government agencies. I was in charge of developing and releasing Bug fixes to Stork Pilot project. It is EU cross border information passing gateway. The main goal of the project was to test if it is possible to provide a secure authentication gateway for all EU members who have a 3rd-degree secure-auth method. Such as "Id card" or "Mobile-Id". While working there I also gained some knowledge on Java-based GIS software, but I'd rather not elaborate on that because of NDA.

After working there for over two years, and them not meeting the higher salary demand, I decided to leave. At that time, I was earning as little as 1k€ per month, which is well below the industry average. As we have mandatory military service, which I managed to pass on while being in school, was upon me once again. Beforehand I trained myself and made the psychological preparations to go thro it. It was one damn long year. On the positive side, now I have experience of leading and trained team of 30 young soldiers twice as my primary duty turned out to be Drill-Sergeant.

After the military, I was referred to work on two projects. One was ERP software for a printing company, developed on Meteor, and NodeJS and another one was mobile micropayments startup. Both went well, and we achieved growth for the startup by enabling them to accept more clients. As there was a massive load on the server, micro-services were the go-to strategy. 

On the other hand, the Printing company was more challenging. We built entirely new back-office software for them on Meteor and autoforms. I was enabling them to manage their clients and send biddings to the new client more efficiently and faster. I also added Goals monitoring for the sales team and the printing crew who print the order. 

I had a plan in my mind to go for small word travelling experience. I only got to Vietnam so far where I stayed for three months. Since I was travelling with a motorbike, I had to cut my clients, because there wasn't enough time to do it all together. When I came back to my home country, I found out they had found new developers as they were searching already before I left.