Sixteen years, a hundred projects, and most of them still running
I am Nikola Dikić, a full-stack developer working remotely worldwide, with sixteen years of experience and more than a hundred projects behind me — from small brochure sites through high-traffic news portals to complex B2B and B2C ecommerce, ERP and CRM integrations, and configurable products.
Two kinds of work, roughly evenly split. I build complex custom web applications from scratch — twenty-six of my projects started as an empty directory, with the theme, templates, database, admin and deployment all mine. And I modernise legacy applications: taking something that has been running for years, bringing it up to date, and adding what makes sense rather than what was on a wish list.
The second kind is usually already in production when I arrive. A store taking orders, a subscription system billing thousands of people every month, a catalogue that has to agree with an ERP. That constrains everything — the work has to happen while the money keeps moving.
That has shaped how I work more than any particular technology. I map data before I move it. I repair the old database before migrating out of it. I build the rollback and then test it, even on the projects where I never end up needing it.
Along the way I have led teams — up to five developers at Jola CGI, where I was also acting as fractional CTO, setting up the stack and workflow, writing proposals and estimates, and managing budgets because there was no CFO to do it. I still prefer to be the one writing the code.
Forty-five minutes, no charge.
You talk to me, not to an account manager.
How I got here
Roughly chronological. The overlaps are real — most of these years had more than one thing running at once.
Senior Full-Stack Developer & Team Lead
Doo APP d.o.o., Belgrade
Built donacije.rs, a charity donation platform that funded medical care for children, and hotsport.rs, a sports portal that went on to take millions of visits. Managed a small team and took the hardest parts of the codebase myself.
Senior Full-Stack Developer & Team Lead
Comtrade Group
The group's main corporate site plus the Gaming, System Integration, Tesla and Edit World properties. Multilingual, multisite, multiple countries. Worked directly with the marketing and design departments and handled deployment, servers and hosting.
BSc, First Class Honours
SAE Institute & Middlesex University, London
Web Development and Multimedia, studied alongside full-time client work.
Senior Developer, then Team Lead, then CTO
JolaUSA / Jola CGI d.o.o.
Started building custom WooCommerce themes; ended up recruiting and running a team of five, establishing the stack and workflow, writing proposals and estimates, and managing budgets and timelines. Travelled to Delhi and Kerala for recruitment and partner selection.
Arkansas Lighting
Nine years on one integration
Built the storefront from scratch, integrated it two-way with NetSuite and Macolla, added a WebGL shade configurator on live product data, and then maintained and upgraded the whole thing for nine years while managing the team and the ERP vendors.
Toptal, Verified Expert in Engineering
Independent client work from here on
Foreign Policy, Progressive Christianity, Digital Silk, Web X.0 Media, Ruckus, Teknicks, and a long tail of agencies and direct clients across the US, Canada, Australia and Europe.
Independent, full time
Remote, worldwide
Currently rebuilding subscription and wallet systems at Informed Citizen, and finishing a rebuild at Sparketh. Taking on integration, migration and performance work directly.
Still running
The most honest thing I can show you is not a screenshot. It is that things I built a long time ago are still doing their job, in some cases years after I stopped being paid to look at them.
donacije.rs
Built · handed over 2015
Still collecting donations for medical care today.
autoskolapavlin.com
Built · maintained to 2025
Driving school with a full test-practice system. Same developer the whole way.
rsk.rs
Built
Handball referee association portal — schedules, profiles, filtering. Running in its original design.
Arkansas Lighting
2016 — 2025
Two-way ERP sync and a WebGL configurator, maintained continuously.
Pan Com
Built
Corporate site still online in the version I shipped. Nobody has needed to touch it.
Fabrika Znanja
Built
Education platform, still carrying real students rather than sitting there.
None of this is an accident, and none of it is luck. Sites last when the code is boring where boring is correct, when the dependencies are ones that will still exist in five years, and when the next developer can read what the last one did. I have also been on the other side of that — called in to sites built by people who optimised for the demo rather than the decade, including one Christmas spent recovering a store that could not fulfil its orders. That experience is most of why I build the way I do.
Some of these I stopped maintaining years ago. They are listed because they are still standing, which is the part I would want to know.
How I work
Four things you can hold me to.
I tell you when I am not the right person
If your problem is a Shopify problem, or a data science problem, or genuinely just needs a designer, I would rather say so in the first call than discover it in month three.
Nothing moves until the data is mapped
Every migration I have done well started with reading the old database properly and fixing what was already broken in it. Every migration that goes badly skipped that step.
You talk to me, not to an account manager
I have run teams and I am happy to again, but on the work I take directly the person estimating it is the person writing it.
I build things meant to outlast me
Documented, boring where boring is correct, and possible for the next developer to pick up. Several of my sites have proven this the hard way.
That is the history. What is the problem?
Forty-five minutes, no charge. Bring the platform, the order volume, and whatever is currently keeping you up.