Aleksandar Nikodinovski

Context

Menadžment Centar Beograd is a Serbian management training and consulting firm. It sells places at a congress for finance directors, and needed to reach the people who hold that role across Serbian municipalities. The list was built by hand: interns going through public directories page by page, for weeks at a time. I was put on the same task, worked out roughly how many pages that came to, and took the view that it belonged to a script rather than a person.

Approach

• Scraped the national registry of Serbian public bodies (Poverenik) in full, turning scattered pages into one structured list of municipal contacts.
• Resolved organisation records into named contacts through the RocketReach API.
• Added a Gemini-based classification step to sort organisations by what they actually do, from their public descriptions.
• Wrote results straight into Excel with openpyxl, in the format the team already worked in.
• Generated the org-chart presentations automatically with Spire.Presentation, replacing manual slide assembly.
• Handled SEO configuration for mcb-online.rs alongside the pipeline work.

Outcome

Roughly a month of manual list-building removed. The team gets a finished spreadsheet and a finished deck, not an export somebody still has to clean up.

Context

MEF, the Faculty of Applied Management, Economics and Finance in Belgrade, is running its first international scientific conference in December 2026: hybrid, with submissions coming from abroad. The site had to carry deadlines, six themes, committees and a call for papers. What decided everything else was who would be opening it. Earlier MEF conferences drew a large contingent from South Asia, so the page had to assume a modest phone on an unreliable connection rather than a laptop in a Belgrade office on fibre. A call for papers that will not load is a call nobody answers.

Approach

• Built the site fully static with Astro, so there is no server to fall over on the day.
• Kept every conference string in a single data file, so dates, committees and themes can change without anyone touching markup.
• Wrote the hero background as a dependency-free WebGL shader of about 5 KB, with a CSS fallback and a single static frame under reduced motion.
• Rendered the countdown at build time before hydrating it, so nothing moves on the page while it loads.
• Kept gold off white text for contrast, and built the header dropdowns in CSS alone so they stay keyboard-accessible without JavaScript.

Outcome

Lighthouse, Google’s page-quality audit, scores the mobile site 99 for speed and 100 each for accessibility, best practices and SEO. In practice that means the whole page weighs 68 KB, less than a single phone photo, it responds the moment it appears instead of freezing while the rest arrives, and nothing jumps around under your thumb while it loads.

Context

Udruženje Gárdoš is a Serbian–Hungarian friendship society in Zemun, named after the tower on the hill above it. Its site was a WordPress install nobody had touched since 2021: five years out of date, no HTTPS, the front page overwritten with a holding page, and 43,000 spam comments sitting in the database. It had to come back in Serbian, Hungarian and English, and stay on the host the society already pays for, where whoever runs it next can edit it without me.

Approach

• Recovered the old site before wiping it. The uploads were gone, but the database still held the society’s own description of itself and its posts, buried under the spam.
• Built it first as a static Astro site in three languages, then ported it to a custom WordPress theme so the society can post events and news from a normal dashboard.
• Took the palette off a postcard of the tower from around 1900: the paper is the card’s sky, the ink its foliage. The postcard sits beside the text and prints into the page rather than onto it.
• Made the photograph carousel in CSS alone, with no JavaScript, so it works on any browser that can open the page.
• Generated a share card per language at build time, with every letter converted to outlines so Serbian and Hungarian accents never render as empty boxes.

Outcome

Live at gardos.org in all three languages, on the society’s existing host, with HTTPS and an editor the society can use itself. The front page is about 24 KB of HTML.

Context

Coursework for an e-business module at MEF, where the brief was a business model. Small engineering teams run production without a formal on-call process, so escalation is a Slack message at 02:14 and a lottery over who notices. PagerDuty, the standard tool for this, solves it at around $210 a month for ten people, which is exactly what puts it out of reach.

Approach

• Built the product rather than only the deck: a Vue front end on Azure Static Web Apps, fourteen Functions endpoints, Cosmos DB, Entra ID sign-in and role-based access.
• Made escalation a consequence of severity instead of a configuration exercise. Low is logged for the morning standup, medium sends an SMS, high places a Twilio voice call to whoever is on call.
• On-call rotas are visible to the whole team, with admins managing shifts.
• Wrote the commercial case around it: a feature comparison against PagerDuty and Opsgenie, four pricing tiers, TAM/SAM/SOM sizing and a twelve-month roadmap, set out on a Lean Canvas.
• Licensed MIT and self-hostable, on the argument that a team which cannot buy PagerDuty can still run its own.

Outcome

Graded 10, the top mark for the course, for a working MVP and a complete business case. The pricing and market sizing remain a hypothesis rather than a result: there are no pilot teams yet, and the deck says as much.

Context

Every Wendy’s runs its tills, kitchen screens and takeout orders on Aloha, NCR’s restaurant point-of-sale platform, and the desk I was on covered more than 2,000 of those restaurants. Working escalations at L2, I kept seeing first-line agents come unstuck on the same kind of call: a POS that is failing does not behave one to one with the documentation, and reading more of it does not close the gap. What closes it is a real setup sat in front of them, one they are free to poke at and break, which is the one thing you cannot do on a live store at dinner rush. So I built one.

Approach

• Stood up a complete virtualised restaurant: the back-office file server holding the menu and the day’s data, with the terminals staff actually touch registered against it, so the client/server split agents would meet in the field was the one they trained on.
• Added Aloha Kitchen, so an order carried on to the kitchen screens instead of vanishing once it was rung up, with the routing rules that decide which screen sees which item and the bump bars cooks hit to clear a ticket when the food goes out.
• Added Aloha Takeout, so the lab covered collection and delivery orders, the queues they sit in and orders placed for later, rather than dine-in tickets alone.
• Broke it on purpose. Pulling the file server drops the terminals into redundancy mode, where each one keeps taking orders on its own behind a red screen border, so agents saw the failure state and the recovery path before a store ever called about it.

Outcome

New agents could work a file-server failure end to end on a lab they could not damage, before meeting one on a live escalation.