About

Hi there, you’ve reached the website of Spell 3 Limited, which is a software engineering consultancy owned by me - Romanas Sonkinas.

Originally from Lithuania, I have spent most of my career in and around London, UK.

Generally speaking, I am a Software Engineer. More specifically, I’ve spent most of my career in either the IoT or Cloud/SaaS world and know these things pretty well. I’ve also dabbled somewhat into Machine Learning, but don’t consider myself particularly technically competent in that field.

Over the years, I’ve grown to a couple of CTO positions in startups, which made me understand how to build products in a holistic way. I generally find common ground with both engineers and management, and speak both of their languages. I like to remain hands-on, and am not interested in purely managerial work.

I am currently full-time employed as a CTO at SenseAI Vision, mucking about in the exciting field of electron microscopy.

On the side, I am involved in the world of early-stage startups, and work with a couple of them on both product discovery and engineering challenges.

Things I think I’m good at Link to heading

• Building systems religiously observing the KISS and YAGNI principles
• Building teams
• Product-focused engineering
• DevOps and infrastructure topics
• Moving fast and breaking things
• … and getting things done

Things I don’t think I’m good at Link to heading

• Working with people who over-emphasise process and “correctness”
• Ossified organisations where it is impossible to get anything done

Tech stuff Link to heading

• Python
• Java
• C++
• C#/.NET
• Ruby (although I haven’t touched this for a few years now)
• Kubernetes
• Linux/Unix stuff
• All sorts of Cloud/DevOps things (AWS, Azure, Terraform, Ansible, …)
• Weird stuff like ZigBee and other things from the world of IoT