philajan

Location: St. Louis, MO

Remote: Yes, 6 years remote/hybrid; US time zones.

Willing to relocate: No

Technologies: Java, TypeScript, JavaScript, Spring Boot, Guice, Express, React, Angular, Express.js, Tailwind, Kafka, RabbitMQ, Cassandra, Python, Kubernetes, Docker, Terraform, Helm, AWS (Lambda, S3), Datadog, Backstage, Playwright, Cypress, JUnit

Résumé/CV: https://philljanowski.com/PhillJanowskiResume.pdf

E mail: philajan <at> pm <dot> me

I'm Phill, a backend-leaning, full stack engineer with 9 years of experience building and operating enterprise SaaS. I'm currently a Senior Site Reliability Engineer and am looking to get back to owning and building products. I have extensive experience planning and leading implementation of large scale features from cloud infrastructure to user interfaces.

What I've done: - Cut permission-check latency 97% (~6s -> ~150ms) on an enterprise-wide authorization service backing every authenticated request across the company, by redesigning resolution over nested group inheritance - Cut cross-datacenter configuration propagation time 92% between AWS legacy VM applications - Built an AI production-review tool on Backstage (TypeScript/React/Express) over an in-house LLM service, surfacing production risk teams can triage in a short meeting

Outside of work I ship projects. Earlier this year I published BookBounce[0], an application I use to keep my son's bedtime stories in constant rotation. I'm currently working on Grain Of Salt[1], a recipe application with version control for iterating on recipes.

I'm looking for a full time position where I can contribute to impactful projects.

[0] https://www.grainofsalt.app/ [1] https://bedtimebookhelper.com/

Working on / dog fooding my graph based recipe app[0].

There are more things I'd like to do with the graph concept, like linking two user's recipe trees if they were imported via the same URL. Really trying to to avoid features that I think would be cool that don't provide any functionality.

There are still a few features I'd like to implement that are more in the vein of nice to have in any recipe application, like nested recipes, temperature conversions, volumetric ingredients amounts to mass conversions, etc.

But I've been using it for new recipes and converting my old recipes I have written down in the margins to this format and I've been happy with how usable its been in these early stages.

[0] https://grainofsalt.app

Here’s the accompanying article from the Science & Tech section.

https://www.economist.com/science-and-technology/2026/09/23/...

Gift link: https://www.economist.com/science-and-technology/2026/09/23/...

Anecdote: My dad has had two shoulder surgeries, one to repair his rotator cuff +15 years ago on his right arm, one back in March of this year on his other shoulder. I couldn’t tell you what specifically was wrong with it this time.

He was a regular golfer until last year when the pain got too bad to play through. He just started playing golf again at the beginning of September. He told me after three or so rounds he can’t even tell he had surgery or any previous pain in that shoulder.

He’s had one doctor do his knee surgery and the aforementioned shoulder surgery and he’s really happy with all of their work.

I hope you have as good of an experience as my dad has had.

The pricing says one time payment but the price is $25 for 6 months.

Is this 6 months of access or 6 months of updates and lifetime access to those updated versions?

Just wanted to let you know Twitter, GH, and RSS icons fall behind the nav bar at least on mobile.

This is neat. Have you noticed any difference in duplicate detection between strongly typed and loosely typed languages / code bases?

In every monolithic Java Jersey server I worked in there was always at least 1 class using @MatrixParam instead of the query param equivalent. No one could ever answer me why or who because it was always written in a project before it migrated to git.

The local news includes the body cam video.

Summary: The farmer was asked to leave by an officer. The farmer acknowledges the request and then walks to the head table to start handing the members documents. He was asked again to leave a couple of more times replying with “On what grounds” and then comes the “…flat and final ‘Arrest him’” that the article mentions.

Some context was left out between the his three minutes to speak being up and the arrest.

I imagined the location has to do with the nearby Callaway Nuclear power plant, and the solar projects that Ameren have been putting up in Montgomery County for the past few years.

I’ve been considering new features on Book Bounce for my use cases. I’m pretty hesitant to start anything new on it while I’m waiting for approval for Google Play…

https://bedtimebookhelper.com/

In the mean time, I’m working on a recipe application I’ve had countless false starts on. It’s centered around iterations and version on recipes, tracking changes to ingredients and directions to build new a new recipe from an existing one.

I’m starting with a go Bubbletea tui this time and I’ve been having a lot of fun with it compared to the React SPAs I’ve tried before. Not feeling compelled to style anything while working on the UX has been nice.

Built a book rotation, reading activity tracker, OpenLibrary ebook reader for my son’s story time.

https://bedtimebookhelper.com/

After coming back from paternity leave, I found that my team had really leaned in to AI driven development. This project was half catching up and half attempting to solve the burn out from the repeated books my wife and I were experiencing.

Can confirm this is what scanning the QR code does. I just went through this to get my Google dev account verified.

I’m working on a story time utility.(https://bedtimebookhelper.com/)

You build up a library from your physical books by scanning them in or discover OpenLibrary books to read in app. Then as you mark books in your library as read, it starts building a rotation and recommending books you haven’t read recently. I’ve been using this nightly to track my son’s 1000 books before kindergarten for the last couple of months.

Currently, I’m working to get the app out on Google Play and adding multiple story time attendee support.

I’m getting ready for the first release of a story time app my wife and I have been using for reading to our son.

The scope creeped to book discovery and ebook reading with OpenLibrary from just tracking and personal library recommendations.

But we have been able to incorporate new books into the story time rotation so I’m convinced it’s worth it.

It’s definitely been fun experiencing the range of quality for kids books in the internet archive.

I’m aiming for a May 1.0 release on iOS and Android.

I've been working on an app to track my son's 1000 books before kindergarten. I've also added QOL features like barcode scanning for adding books to the library and creating a rotation based on the last time the book was read and whether I actually enjoy reading it. (The books I don't like make it through the rotation just with less frequency.)

This was an excuse to ship a mobile app for the first time and get familiar with supabase.

After these last few bugs are fixed, its ready for a semi-public TestFlight with our friends who have kids.

A hot reloadable menu library for raylib / raygui applications in Zig.

https://github.com/pajanowski/raymenuz

I want to use this for future raylib games as a developer menu.

I wanted to learn more Zig and be able to add or remove game state fields to and from the screen without having to recompile.

From my experience, nice decorations. I haven't gone further than getting a top bar set up and getting my normal shortcuts setup.

I'm sure I'm not getting everything everything I could out of it.

I’m really curious about your experience, what distro you used hyprland on, what dotfiles did damage to your install etc.

I just installed hyprland yesterday and outside of having to switch back to i3 once to install what they had set for a terminal in their default config(kitty), I haven’t had to leave again.

  Location: St. Louis, MO
  Remote: Hybrid or Remote (5 years of WFH)
  Willing to relocate: No
  Technologies: Java, Typescript, Javascript, Cassandra(NoSQL), AWS, Terraform, Python, Guice, Spring, SpringBoot, Angular, GWT, JUnit, Cypress, React, React Native, Docker, Kubernetes, Keycloak, Kafka, RabbitMQ
  Résumé/CV: https://philljanowski.com/PhillJanowskiResume.pdf
  Email: philajan <at] pm <dot] me

I'm Phill, a backend leaning, full stack software engineer with 7.5 years of experience building enterprise SaaS solutions. I have extensive experience planning and leading implementation of large scale features from cloud infrastructure to user interfaces. I have a strong background in software stability improvements, algorithm optimization, and K8s resource management using OpenTelemetry, Grafana Tempo, and Splunk. In my free time, I build software including GreekUtils[1], a Greek Life centric, cloud based CRM.

I'm capable of learning anything when met with the challenge. I'm looking for a full time position where I can contribute to meaningful projects while learning new technologies and methodologies in software engineering.

[1] https://greekutils.com/

  Location: St. Louis, Missouri, USA
  Remote: Yes
  Willing to relocate: No
  Technologies: Java, Typescript, Javascript, Cassandra(NoSQL), Terraform, Python, Guice, Spring, SpringBoot, Angular, GWT, JUnit, Cypress, React, React Native, Docker, Kubernetes, AWS, Keycloak, Kafka, RabbitMQ
  Résumé/CV: https://philljanowski.com/PhillJanowskiResume.pdf
  Email: philajan <at> pm <.> me

I'm Phill, a backend leaning, full stack software engineer with 7 years of experience building enterprise SaaS solutions. I have extensive experience planning and leading implementation of large scale features from cloud infrastructure to user interfaces. I have a strong background in software stability improvements, algorithm optimization, and K8s resource management using OpenTelemetry, Grafana Tempo, and Splunk. In my free time, I build software including GreekUtils[1], a Greek Life centric, cloud based CRM.

I'm capable of learning anything when met with the challenge. I'm looking for a full time position where I can contribute to meaningful projects while learning new technologies and methodologies in software engineering.

[1] https://greekutils.com/

I'm on my fraternity's alumni board. The chapter has been using spread sheets for everything since I was an active member. Every year, information about recruitment gets lost in the shuffle between officers.

I've been working on a bespoke CRM for them to prevent the spreadsheet rot while providing some helpful visualization and making their data easier to use in the feature. The goal is to make the entire recruitment process self documenting.

Its slowly evolving into a way to keep track of actives and alumni, as well as ways for actives to interact with the recruitment process.

https://greekutils.com

There's also a working demo https://demo.greekutils.com/rush-analyzer/ui/#/