Lior Bragilevsky

 👏 Hi there!

🍁 My name is Lior Bragilevsky and I am a self-taught Full Stack Developer & DevOps Engineer from Vancouver, BC, Canada.

💉 During my time as a student, I always enjoyed incorporating code into my workflow - especially when it came to "visual" based work. Over the years I had the pleasure to work with a few companies on exciting state of the art projects as part of my co-operative education experience and graduated from Simon Fraser University(SFU) with a Bachelor degree - BASc with Distinction in August 2018. After that, I continued with academia and focused on research in the field of machine learning & artificial intelligence. Soon after, I graduated from SFU, again, with Master's degree - MASc First Class with Distinction back in April 2020 - during the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic.

💻 This valuable educational experience/career has taught me the value of learning new things on a daily basis and motivated me to work on my skillset during the lockdown until I could find a job. During this time, I authored many open source projects that other people enjoyed using. As soon as I delved into the realm of website design/development - something that I always knew I wanted to do, but simply did not take seriously before - I was hooked. This is when I started my career as a self-taught Full Stack Developer & DevOps Engineer.

📈 This year was filled with ups and downs, but I started grasping concepts that once seems impossible for me to understand, and was getting very confident with my coding skillset and knowledge of various tools. This is when I decided to launch my own commercial product - TabMerger - a cross browser extension which merges your tabs into one location to save memory usage and increase your productivity. Expecting only a few close friends/family to use TabMerger, I was pleasantly surprised when it gained over 1100 users across 3 different browsers in just a matter of a few months. This is when I decided to make TabMerger open source and build a community of like minded coders who can help make TabMerger a must have product for everyone. Again, I was blown away by the support of GitHub users, as within a couple of days, TabMerger's repository gained over 100 stars and quickly started to gain traction. TabMerger's repository can be found here: https://github.com/lbragile/TabMerger. Contributions, suggestions, and honest feedback is always appreciated and welcomed.

🙏 As a recent graduate during a worldwide pandemic, I am struggling to find work. At times it is a little disheartening since I put in so much work, but at the end of the day since I have a degree which is not in the field of computer science, my situation is much tougher than others. To make matters worse, my Master's degree over-qualifies me for most junior level positions (something a referee told me). That being said, your sponsorship will help me ease my financial burden so that I can focus on making and contributing to more commercial (open source) projects that others can use to improve their day-to-day life.

🥰 Thank you all for your support and have a great day,
— Lior