What I Actually Do (And Why I'm Writing About It)

I’m Goran Ninković, a Senior Fullstack Engineer at Euronet Worldwide, working on a platform used by about 6,000 merchants. I’ve been building e-commerce software for 7 years — PHP and Vue.js, mostly — across companies in Serbia and the Netherlands.

I’m starting this Substack because I keep solving problems at work that I think other developers would find useful, and the only place that knowledge lives is in my head or in internal Confluence pages that nobody reads.

I’m not a framework author or a conference speaker. I’m an engineer who works on a team, ships code, reviews PRs, and occasionally convinces five out of six colleagues to change their development setup. That’s the perspective I’ll write from.

Practical engineering decisions — the kind that don’t make it into documentation because they’re too specific, too opinionated, or too boring for a conference talk, but matter enormously in day-to-day work.

Topics I’m planning:

- Local development environments. I migrated a team from XAMPP to WSL + DDEV and later ran a workshop for an entirely different department. There’s a post about that coming next week.

- PHP code quality tooling. I maintain an open source project PHP Booster that bundles PHPStan, Psalm, Rector, ECS, and Deptrac into a pre-configured stack. I’ll write about why each tool is there and how they work together.

- Architecture decisions in small teams. I’ve written 11 ADRs for a backend project. I’ll share what worked, what was overkill, and how to get a team to actually follow them.

- Frontend modernization. I rebuilt a Merchant Portal from AngularJS to Nuxt 3. There are lessons there about migration strategy, component design, and when to rewrite vs. refactor.

Hot takes, framework wars, or “10 VS Code Extensions That Will Change Your Life.” There’s enough of that.

Every 2-3 weeks. I’d rather publish one useful post per month than four mediocre ones. If I don’t have something worth your time, I won’t post.

- GitHub: https://github.com/TerrorSquad

- LinkedIn: goran-ninkovic

- Website: goranninkovic.com

If any of this sounds useful, subscribe. The first real post — about migrating a PHP team from XAMPP to WSL + DDEV — is coming next week.