Tomislav Gountchev

Tomislav Gountchev is a server-side Java developer with 20 years of professional experience. He has a scientific background, having obtained a B.A. in Natural Sciences, and a Ph.D. in Chemistry.

After academia, Tomislav made a career switch and started work as a Java Software Engineer. He joined the early e-commerce startup NexTag, where he spent a few years as one of the key developers of its Java-based search engine. Tomislav also worked for some time at eBay, as a Java developer in their product search team. As an engineer in these first online shopping companies, Tomislav experienced first hand how the internet started changing the everyday life of people, and is proud to have been a part of this.

Later, he co-founded Nabble, a website for hosted public forums, where he spent several years as a Senior Java Engineer, responsible for the design and implementation of multiple backend components, supervising other developers, and handling system administration tasks. Nabble was one early attempt at building an ecosystem of forums, multiple interconnected communities, each with its own rules but without a centrally imposed control. The experience from Nabble was a valuable insight into the problems and needs of decentralized and self-organized online communities.

After Nabble, Tomislav worked briefly as an R&D Software Engineer for Hippo - an open source enterprise CMS company. More recently, he became interested in blockchain technology, and started contributing to the Nxt project. In 2018, Tomislav became one of the first employees of Jelurida Swiss SA, where he now serves as a Director and Lead Software Architect.