Ukraine
Hi, I'm Dimko Zhluktenko. 🇺🇦 I'm a Ukrainian soldier, founder, author, and analyst working where defense, technology, and frontline experience meet. I serve with Ukraine's Unmanned Systems Forces. I started as a UAV/ISR drone pilot in an active combat role on the front in Donetsk Oblast, flying reconnaissance and strike missions, and now work on three things: international cooperation, innovation, and lessons learned. My role in the Army is to turn what actually happens on the battlefield into knowledge our partners and our own units can act on. I also hold an MA in Public Administration from the Ukrainian Catholic University (UCU) in Lviv (2026), and BSc in Computer Science from Lviv Polytechnic National University. When Russia launched its full-scale invasion, I founded Dzyga's Paw, a tech-driven charity that has raised $6M+ from ordinary people in more than 70 countries. The mission is simple: equip Ukrainian forces with the technology that wins fights and saves lives, from drones to encrypted radios. Learn more at dzygaspaw.com. I came to this from engineering. I built and architected distributed, high-load systems, led teams across .NET, Java, Python, Go, and Kubernetes, and founded @lvivdotnet for Ukrainian software engineers. That background shapes how I see modern warfare now: a contest of speed, iteration, and getting the right tools into the right hands faster than the enemy. I also wrote a book about my war journey: Ordinary Guy at War, available at https://kovyla.pub/dimko. I believe in freedom, in innovation, and in the practical power of technology to change outcomes. Let's connect if you want to collaborate, exchange lessons from the front, or support Ukraine. 🇺🇦
When Russia launched its full-scale invasion on February 24, 2022, I left my IT career to defend Ukraine. I used my connections in the military to start supplying frontline units with the high-tech equipment they were missing. It began as a personal effort: my own savings, a handful of friends in uniform, and whatever gear I could source fast. That effort became Dzyga's Paw, a charity fund named after my dog, Dzyga, who stands for resilience and freedom. What I built rests on one principle: transparency. Consistent public reporting is what turned grassroots trust into $6M+ raised from donors across more than 70 countries. The results are concrete: thousands of high-tech items delivered directly to Ukrainian units, including drones, Starlink terminals, night vision, encrypted radios, generators, and EOD equipment; logistics managed personally to the frontline, from sourcing specialized gear to coordinating with military contacts and keeping supply chains running under wartime conditions; and a team of volunteers and staff built and led to scale all of it. This is not a job: it is a mission. I am a Ukrainian committed to my country's independence, and I bring organization, communication, and technology to make a difference where it counts. Whether I am planning a supply route, managing suppliers, or writing a detailed report for donors, the goal is the same: protect lives and keep Ukraine in the fight. Learn more at dzygaspaw.com and join us in standing for freedom.
I am leader of local software engineering community @lvivdotnet. This passion incorporates inspiring people by introducing them into the community of other people who professionally are different from them, thus there is always a room for learning or mentoring for somebody. The main idea behind is not to only have tech talks which bring practical value (and could be pretty much seen on YouTube) but to have people connect in the community, introduce them to the group projects, have them discuss controversial topics, collaborate, make new friends, and learn from each other. And me, as a community leader, is responsible for all my people to feel safe, to have a place to discuss things and to get inspired by me and other members. So, what do I do? - Inspire people by my example and by example of people I bring to the community - Organizing monthly events for ~100ppl by finding the location, negotiating with partners, finding appropriate speakers, deeply reviewing their talks and in the end is running the event itself at the spot - Created and running the website - https://lviv.dotnet.city/ - Created and running the FB page (~1000 likes) - https://www.facebook.com/lvivdotnet - Created and running the Twitter account - https://twitter.com/lvivdotnet - Created and running the Telegram chat (~450 members with active discussions) - https://t.me/lvivdotnet - Connecting with global partners such as Microsoft, JetBrains, OzCode to get the best stuff for my people - Connecting with local partners in Ukraine such as SoftServe, ELEKS, Intellias, etc, so we can develop local market - Creating full-day conferences such as Global Azure Bootcamp 2017 Lviv, Global Azure Bootcamp 2018 Lviv, Global Azure Bootcamp 2019 Lviv, and, unfortunately, no Global Azure Bootcamp 2020 Lviv since I decided to cancel it in favor of not letting anybody get hurt by the coronavirus. - Connecting the communities by involving foreign speakers, creating shared events with other communities
I've switched from technical leadership roles into a much wider, a more community exposed position of Developer Advocate at Portainer.io. Here, I make an impact in communicating the value of our product to fellow developers curious about container management and Kubernetes management. Some great things are coming my way! Update: The war came to Ukraine, and I have switched 100% of my time to running my own volunteer facility collecting millions of dollars to spend them on advanced equipment for UA SOF and Army. See dzygaspaw.com.
Software Engineering for smart vending machines system. Working in distributed international team as Software Engineer. Event sourcing, Domain Driven Design, CQRS, Kafka, Azure, ETL, k8s, Docker. - Built up the billing-payment domain from the scratch in CQRS & ES & DDD passion - Created the shared repo for reusable components, such as nuget packages, and pushed for reducing the technical debt with that. Achieved more than 100,000 downloads of packages extracted to shared repo. - .NET coding for microservices interacting with cloud services, message brokers et cetera, - Building up the Azure / k8s infrastructure via Terraform for the whole team which enabled us to have speedy development, with no time wasted on bringing up our own infrastructure - figuring out the business / dev observability needs and implementing them - dashboards, alerts, structured logging, distributed tracing, metrics. - conducting company-wide internal trainings on topics such as Release Management (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x7AKZAgseJA), CQRS & ES & DDD, etc. - created online team-building activity for 20 people which improved relations between team members drastically (and made article on that https://dmytrozhluktenko.medium.com/organize-an-online-team-building-now-dcb56832f7a5 )
Project - Comprehensive Digital Experience for an Aircraft Configurator: https://www.txtgroup.com/markets/aerospace-aviation/product-configuration/ Working in a team of 3 people (Solution Architect, Product Owner and Software Engineer) as a Software Engineer in Agile manner. Creating a custom software solution for configuring a brand-new aircraft to be manufactured. With review of architect, fully defined and created data models, technical stack, data transfer approaches, communication between applications for the system that had to support full-text search, ordering, filtering, performant cross-table querying, system-specific complex data types, customer-specific features, integration with another systems, et cetera. Did TDD approach for writing integration / automated tests for the solution. Along with the architect, was responsible for delivering the product to the customer which led to a successful release of MVP. The whole process was done within Agile methodology, with day-by-day communication with the customer regarding defining the priorities based on the feedback. Daily standups, groomings, retrospectives, backlog refinements were usual part of the process. Tech: ASP.NET core 3.1, PostgreSQL, EF Core, NSwag, integration testing, Docker, K8s
Working at Munich-based small software company on different projects. - Understanding business problems, communicating the value of introducing this or that, lowering the costs for Azure, etc. - Creating different prototypes and PoC's using such instruments as .NET, Java, Scala, Python et cetera. - Creating fully automated CI/CD pipelines for existing and newly built solutions using Azure DevOps (former VSTS), Jenkins, PS scripts, sh scripts, Python scripts, az cli, kubectl, kustomize. - Creating fully automated infrastructure as code (ARM templates, terraform) for k8s, k8s on Azure (i.e. AKS), IoT Hubs, event hubs, Storage Accounts, Azure Key Vault, Jaeger, Prometheus, Elastic-Search, Kibana, Fluentd, and similar resources. - Migrating big existing solutions from one ecosystem to another (e.g. Azure Service Fabric to Kubernetes, VSTS to Jenkins+BitBucket, ARM templates to terraform). - Building microservices with Docker&k8s, Java, Python, ASP.NET Core, Serilog logging, xUnit/nUnit, FluentAssertions, NSubstitute, pytest, JUnit, ELK stack, OpenTracing/Jaeger tracing, Prometheus metrics, Grafana dashboards. - Documenting and demonstrating solutions by developing the documentation, flowcharts, layouts, diagrams charts, code comments, and clear code. - Designing some features completely i.e. within all the parts of the system, defining communication protocols & DTOs, splitting into tasks, estimating using different technics. - Planning sessions, estimation sessions, code review sessions, pair programming sessions.