Software engineer · Go · distributed systems

I build backend systems that stay up.

Small, explicit Go — the packages ship stdlib-only. I write the boring parts carefully — lifecycle, errors, health — so the interesting parts have somewhere solid to stand.

View the work Get in touch
5 yrs
writing Go
zero
deps, my Go pkgs
MIT
licensed, all
wire it up in main.go
func main() { app := samsara.NewApplication( samsara.WithSupervisor(sup), samsara.WithLogger(slog.Default()), samsara.WithShutdownTimeout(30*time.Second), ) // ordered startup, health-gated readiness, // graceful drain on SIGTERM — all handled. if err := app.Run(); err != nil { os.Exit(1) } }
Selected work

Things I've shipped.

all repos ↗
featured go stdlib only

samsara

a lifecycle runtime for Go services

Components fail, restart, and return to service. Samsara makes that cycle explicit and observable — ordered startup, dependency graphs, health-gated readiness, tiered failure, and graceful shutdown that drains the load balancer before anything stops. The messy parts of main.go, handled. It runs in production — under client services as well as my own.

supervisor health-checks graceful-shutdown zero-deps
View source ↗
sup := samsara.NewSupervisor() sup.Add(hs) // health server: starts first, stops last sup.Add(postgres.New(cfg), samsara.WithTier(samsara.TierCritical), samsara.WithRestartPolicy( samsara.ExponentialBackoff(5, time.Second)), ) sup.Add(httpServer, samsara.WithDependencies("postgres", "redis"), ) // /readyz flips to 503 the instant shutdown begins.
in development go react postgres

Agora

a Discord bot that runs the server as a democracy

Members earn standing from real participation, and that standing weights the elections that fill the role hierarchy — approval, STV and ranked ballots with liquid delegation, tallied once and reconciled straight onto Discord roles. A Go service on my own samsara runtime: gateway connection, ticker-driven workers, per-guild scoring, a premium entitlement state machine behind signature-verified Paddle webhooks, and a GDPR erase/export orchestrator that fails the build when a new table forgets to join it. I run the platform and the paperwork too — hardened host behind Traefik and Cloudflare, containerised deploys from CI, and a counsel-reviewed DPA, SCC and consumer-withdrawal set behind the checkout.

discord-gateway voting-systems self-hosted gdpr paddle-billing
A marble bust of Justice in profile, framed by a golden ring and the two pans of a balance scale
Visit site ↗ closed source
closed alpha go react postgres

Vitae Viscera

an asynchronous biopunk colony sim

Grow a living flesh-ecosystem — feed it, spawn creature-drones, send them on missions, and mutate what returns home. A Go backend on my own samsara runtime (a domain per feature, argon2id passwords with rotating refresh tokens, and a render-on-read event log localized per reader) behind a React SPA. An ongoing solo project, currently in closed alpha.

domain-driven jwt-auth i18n idle-loop
A glowing red organ suspended in a hexagonal frame, three smaller organs — green, gold and dark — tethered to it by translucent tissue
Live demo ↗ invite-only
full-stack python go react

noir-code

a QR code that is a noir comic panel

Encode text into a hand-inked halftone cityscape, then read it back from a screenshot or a phone photo — grayscale tonal channels plus Reed–Solomon error correction and adaptive sizing. A Python CV core, a stateless Go gateway (Fiber, ports & adapters), and a React SPA with live camera scanning.

opencv reed-solomon fiber vite
A noir comic panel encoding data as a halftone cityscape
Live demo ↗ View source ↗
go zero-deps

mishap

explicit error handling

Every error carries a typed Code you can match with errors.Is — no string parsing. Codes survive wrapping through the whole cause chain.

source ↗
go samsara

samsara-components

batteries for the runtime

Ready-made lifecycle components — datastores, servers, workers — that satisfy the samsara contract out of the box, so a new service wires up in minutes instead of boilerplate.

source ↗
go samsara

samsara-template

a production service, scaffolded

A runnable starter that wires samsara, mishap, and the components into a service with health endpoints, structured logging, and graceful shutdown already in place. Clone and ship.

source ↗
How I work

Four things I don't compromise on.

Most of my work is infrastructure other engineers depend on. That earns a specific kind of discipline.

01

Small and explicit

No magic, no reflection soup. You can read a whole package in an afternoon and know exactly what it does — and what it won't.

02

Zero dependencies

The Go packages ship with nothing but the standard library. Fewer things to audit, fewer things to break, nothing to wait on at 3am.

03

Fail fast, recover cleanly

Ordered startup, honest health checks, shutdown that drains. Crashes are designed for — not feared, not papered over.

04

Boring is a feature

I optimise for the reader, the on-call engineer, and the future me. The best infrastructure is the kind nobody has to think about.

Get in touch

Happy to talk shop.

Currently employed. I take on the occasional freelance project when it's a good fit — backend, platform, Go. Tell me what you're shipping; I read everything.

emailnikita.zotov@suncake.xyz ↗ telegram@Sunkek ↗ githubgithub.com/sunkek ↗ linkedinnikita-zotov-dev ↗