About me
Hi everyone! My name is Sergey Teryoshkin, but online I've long been known as Tomas Lee, hence the address of this site. Let me tell you a bit about who I am, how I ended up in IT and how I can be useful to you.
How it all started
I started out in 2004 in Novokuznetsk as an ordinary system administrator at City-Net, an internet service provider. It was one of the largest ISPs in Novokuznetsk; later it was bought by Sibirskie Seti from Novosibirsk, and that deal grew their corporate customer base by more than a third. Linux and Windows servers, Postfix mail, FTP, vulnerability hunting and endless updates. A classic sysadmin school, after which I know Linux from the inside out.
Then came several companies in a row, and at each one I took on more and more. At Kora-TK I looked after a chain of grocery stores: computers, PBX, retail equipment, opening new locations.
At Formula-Novokuznetsk I prepared the infrastructure for SAP R/3, designed the phone network and video surveillance, and for the first time planned a department's annual budget myself. And in 2008 at Iva I was already running the IT department: I built the domain and local network from scratch and rolled out 1C:Enterprise 8.1.
Eleven years at an ISP
In 2009 I joined RDTC, an internet provider and telecom company in Novokuznetsk, and stayed there for eleven years.
Portals, IPTV and online streaming
The first years were probably the most fun. We built the kino, mp3 and tv.hutor.ru entertainment portals, assembled a system that received DVB-S satellite signal and turned it into an online stream, launched IPTV and even built our own PPPoE terminator on ordinary x86 hardware. It sounds like archaeology now, but back then it was really cool.
Network design
Then I moved into design work: fiber-optic lines, local networks, video surveillance. Keeping fiber splicing documentation by hand was a pain, so I wrote my own system for it in PHP, PostgreSQL and PostGIS.
It could certify telecom nodes, draw the network on a map and find free fibers. The code is still on GitHub, and this video shows how it all worked.
Business development
From 2017 I headed the business development department, and that took me far beyond technology. Video surveillance, internet access, satellite vehicle tracking, tachographs: for each line I had to figure out how to grow it and how to sell it.
I ran the sales team, was responsible for targets and the budget, and went to negotiations with municipalities and businesses together with the CEO. Along the way I untangled business processes, automated routine work and helped build DevOps.
That experience was valuable not so much technically as because I learned to look at IT through the eyes of the business.
Moving to Novosibirsk
By 2020 it was clear I had hit the ceiling in Novokuznetsk. There was nowhere left to grow, neither in the work nor in pay, and standing still is not something I'm good at. So I packed up and moved to Novosibirsk, and at the same time went back to where it all began and what I love most: software development.
Expobank
My first job in the new city was at Expobank. There I wrote backend services and microservices with Laravel, RabbitMQ, GraphQL and Camunda.
Tion
The next stop was Tion, a maker of air purification systems, where I was the web development team lead. The main project there was the tion.ru online store on WordPress and building a new blog on Vue 3 and Laravel.
The store had to talk to a Yii2-based CRM and to 1C over a RabbitMQ bus. I also supervised the redesign of the pro.tion.ru B2B website.
NCGI: genetics and IT from scratch
In 2022 I joined NCGI, the National Center for Genetic Research. Many people know it by the MyGenetics brand: DNA tests that tell you about your health, nutrition, sports, longevity and even your ancestry. It's serious science, and the IT behind it has to be reliable.
Rebuilding the department
The trouble was that by the time I arrived, the IT department had to be put together almost from scratch. I rebuilt it and gave it back a real role in the company.
My job was to make people come to IT with their problems again instead of working around it.
New infrastructure
In parallel I built new infrastructure. Previously everything lived on AWS, on scattered VPSs running Java monoliths. I moved the services to a Russian cloud, SberCloud, and ran them under HashiCorp's Nomad orchestrator. The result was a single, scalable microservice system that is easy to manage.
Six months at NAN Agency
In early 2024 I spent six months at NAN Agency to work on a different project. My orchestrator experience came in handy there too: I introduced Nomad and set up several environments. Dev for developers, stage for testers, and only then production. That way every change is checked before users see it.
I also led the team and designed web applications, from small services to large aggregators and multilingual platforms.
Back at NCGI
In the summer of 2024 NCGI invited me back, and I returned.
Website in the cloud
This time I took on the 1C-Bitrix website, which had been living on ordinary shared hosting. I moved it to the cloud and set up a proper deployment pipeline, so releasing updates became a clear, repeatable process. I gave developers a separate dev environment where they can safely try new things without risking the live site.
Team and contractors
In fact, the whole IT side of the company was on me: cloud servers, CRM and in-house automation systems. The IT team grew to 10+ people, and I decided who we needed, ran technical interviews, assigned tasks and reviewed code.
Another big part of the job was working with contractors and outsourcers: negotiating, estimating, keeping things on track. Architecture, integrations and cost estimates for new projects were on me as well.
NCGI in numbers
The results are easiest to see in numbers. More than 250,000 customers use the company's services, and two and a half times as many people inside the company now work with our systems as before.
- 250,000+ customers use the services
- 30 → 80 internal system users
- 1,500 → 9,000 reports generated per month
- 15% → 0.5% service downtime per year
- 86% → 99.5% website uptime per year
What else
I graduated from TUSUR (Tomsk State University of Control Systems and Radioelectronics) in 2011 with a degree in Industrial Electronics, studying by distance learning. I write PHP, Python, C++, Java and JavaScript and work with MySQL and PostgreSQL. Lately I've become seriously interested in neural networks and computer vision.
I live in Novosibirsk. I can work on-site, remotely or in a hybrid format, and I'm open to business travel.
My key skills
- 22+ years in IT. I've gone from system administrator to Head of IT, so I understand the work at every level.
- 5 years leading development teams. Teams of up to 10+ people: hiring, technical interviews, task allocation, oversight, code review.
- Scale. Services for 250,000+ customers and 80 internal users, downtime cut from 15% to 0.5% per year, website uptime raised to 99.5%.
- 15+ years writing code. PHP, Laravel, Yii2, Vue 3, JavaScript, Python, C++. I design systems and sign off on architectural decisions myself.
- Infrastructure and DevOps. Linux, Docker, GitLab, HashiCorp Nomad and Vault, Yandex Cloud. Built orchestrator-based infrastructure three times, moved services and websites to Russian clouds, set up dev and stage environments and full deployment pipelines.
- Integrations. RabbitMQ, GraphQL, Camunda, connecting websites with CRM and 1C.
- 8 years in networks and telecom. Fiber-optic and LAN design, IPTV, online streaming, video surveillance.
- The business side of IT. Department budget, sales, negotiations, working with contractors and outsourcers, project cost estimates.
I'm proactive and like a systematic approach and order in processes. I can sell and persuade, and I defend my point of view with arguments. I'm equally comfortable working in a team, both as a member and as an organizer, and on my own. I'm always learning something new.
How to reach me
I'm currently open to CIO and Head of IT positions. If you need someone to bring order to your infrastructure, set up a development process or build a team, get in touch. Email works best.