Milan Aleksić

Last updated: 05/09/2025

Personal

Born on 21/12/1983, Smederevo (Serbia), living in Koekelberg (Belgium) with my wife and children since 2011. I hold dual citizenship of Belgium and Serbia.

My website is aleksic.dev, email is [email protected] and Bluesky account is: aleksic.dev. I am fairly active on github.com/milanaleksic. My LinkedIn account is @milanaleksic if you’d like to connect with me.

Education & spoken languages

Dipl. Ing. Computer Science & Engineering (2008) from the University of Belgrade (Serbia), Faculty of Electrical Engineering (ETF). “NARIC – Vlaanderen” recognized my diploma as M.Sc..

I speak the following languages: Serbian (mother tongue), English (fluent), Dutch (C1 Effectiveness 1), French (A2, basic level)

Keywords

Java, Go, AWS, Python, PostgreSQL, MySQL

Work experience

[2020-…] Senior Software Engineer @ Soda (remote; HQ in Brussels, Belgium)

Backend founding engineer of Soda, working on Soda Cloud SaaS. Programming languages I used were Java, Python and Go.

Became the company’s go-to backend engineer and MySQL performance guy. Helped scale the company 100x in both customers and revenue over 5 years, all without high-profile incidents of the Soda Cloud product.

Had a multi-hat impact on the organization through domain, infrastructure, and system design. Some of the most prominent features I worked on were Vault Decrypter Service, Guardian Service, Soda Kubernetes Agent, various in-house frameworks for authorization, feature gates, notification rules, database, dependency injection, backend configuration management, OpenAPI code generator, etc.

I also envisioned and developed an internal admin & devops CLI tool (dopy / dogo) for automating many painful DevOps tasks. v1 was in Python, v2 in Go (integrating APIs from AWS, Okta, Datadog, Kubernetes, Soda Cloud Admin API, Github).

[2017-2020] Expert Software Engineer @ TomTom (Ghent, Belgium)

MPU Core Coverage Creation & Extension Team

MLF library: authored code-generated Java wrapper around GDAL OpenFileGDB (later extended to PostGIS and GeoPackage).
- Custom ANTLR grammar for extended validation and Python/Markdown doc generator
Sinatra: Led migration of a complex process into AWS for GIS source data digestion
- PostgreSQL RDS, Spring Boot 2, SQS, ECS, Terraform, Vue.js
Pupin: created machine learning cloud service for data classification (plural junctions problem)
- Training: PostGIS, Python, Scikit-Learn, XGBoost, (Geo)Pandas, Jupyter
- Online+Batch prediction: Terraform / AWS ECS, Spring Boot 2, XGBoost
Dumbo: migration of internal heavily used batch processing tool into the cloud
- AWS Batch, ECS, PostgreSQL, S3, X-Ray; Spring Boot 2, Terraform, Python, Jenkins

Hermes team

Nozem: always-up-to-date OpenStreetMap ingestion service into core TomTom data layer: Kafka, PostgreSQL, Python, Spring Boot, Jenkins
Lego: automated OpenStreetMap features ingestion: k8s, Python, Java, QGIS plugins

[2013-2017] {Senior, Lead} Software Engineer @ Basware (Aalst, Belgium)

Projects:

Basware Network Portal: Full-stack development role on online and internal services
- Tech stack: Play2, Scala, Java8, MongoDB, Spring, Chef, Go
- Rewritten core validation business rules implementation (Java)
Basware e-Archiving: DevOps lead-in-charge and one of lead developers
- Tech stack: CloudFormation, Jenkins, Bash, AWS CLI
- Cloud stack: Java Lambda functions, API GW, S3, DynamoDB, SQS, Splunk
Norsu (Groovy, Cucumber, Gradle): Cross-systems end-to-end testing
Business Metrics dashboards (Akka and Dashing.io)
Migration of legacy Resin applications to Tomcat cluster
- Oracle, JSP, RMI, Ant, Tomcat, Apache2
HAL9000 (Go): Flowdock bot (CI/CD automation helper for 100+ developers)

[2006-2013] Previous work experience

2014: Freelance Consultant (remote) @ Gtech UK (Brussels, Belgium)

2011-2013: Software consultant @ Cronos (Belgium) (Brussels, Belgium)

2009-2011: Software Engineer II @ Gtech G2 Sports Betting (Belgrade, Serbia)

2007-2009: Java Developer @ Arius (Belgrade, Serbia)

2006: Intern software developer @ ESAProjekt (Katowice, Poland)

Selected open source projects

Advent of Code 2023 (Zig): github.com/milanaleksic/adventofcode2023
Advent of Code 2018 (Go): github.com/milanaleksic/adventofcode2018
Personal Web site (Hugo, Cloudflare Pages): github.com/milanaleksic/aleksic.dev

Selected closed source personal projects

Home Laboratory: Hybrid cluster (ARM/AMD, RPis/NUC, Proxmox/Synology NAS, home/Oracle Cloud) connected via Tailscale. Uses Ansible for setup and Kubernetes (k3s) for container scheduling (40+ services: Gitea, Minecraft, yarr, etc.). Deep monitoring via Grafana Stack and Prometheus. Previously a Nomad cluster, migrated away in 2025.
Thought Train (Go, PostgreSQL, NATS, htmx) My main side project – a distributed service for feature-rich web page content extraction, note-taking, and book annotation. Uses an ANTLR search query grammar, Pulumi AWS, mobile apps (Flutter for Android/iOS), and a Chrome Extension (Svelte).
Batler (Go): Personal Telegram bot used for homelab automation and as a main notification pipeline.
Novinarnica (Go): Content crawler and CBR packager for magazines.