Nikita Lilichenko

“This is in the context of Nikita Lilichenko Front End Developer Internship tenure under my guidance and mentorship for a period of 4 months. Nikita hit the ground running learning Angular and building out some of the final critical front end components for our core product Quibbl, a gamified news platform that ranks users based on their credibility predicting trending news stories and events. In doing so, he worked closely with me to align his work to our stack’s data architecture so that our front end components were consistent with the full stack data architecture. While doing so, Nikita was responsible, careful, open-minded & flexible. While this isn’t a full accounting of Nikita’s contributions and strengths, here are a few examples of why I found him to be a talented & effective team contributor working on a relatively complex web-application. Quick Learner / Self Starter - despite not having prior experience with Angular or similar frameworks, Nikita picked up the framework quickly. He demonstrated passion, curiosity and tenacity in overcoming hurdles in the learning process & demonstrated good judgement prioritizing when to learn by swimming in the deep end and when to get help. Based on my exposure to Nikita, I would trust that he has the ability to self start in most application development environments & stacks. By the end of the summer Nikita was contributing professional level UX/UI design while independently troubleshooting relatively complex issues related to asynchronous data flow. Results Oriented - Nikita not only demonstrated solid ability to tackle engineering problems, but he has a strong business/product sense, and played an active role contributing to the development of his own project requirements. He is creative, able to effectively argue in favor of his own proposals, but also receptive to feedback and adjustments based on strategic priorities, etc. Relative to the average junior developer, Nikita played a notably strong role productively shaping the product design and business requirements for his work. Team Player - Nikita built out some of the critical data-presentation components for our front end (leaderboards, hierarchical navigation of topic areas, etc.). This work was complex, required implementing standardized approach to application taxonomies & required carefully coordinating object definitions across the stack. Despite not having prior experience working on a large, complex, multi-developer stack, Nikita quickly picked up the importance of documentation, operating in an approvals environment, etc. He was also an effective team player, not only exploring other developers' code, etc. but collaborating to align standards and test interdependencies across the stack. He showed a willingness and capability to pull up his sleeves and work with me and / or other developers to ensure that code was consistent and standardized and reconcile any issues in testing. Finally, he showed himself to be capable and respo”

“Nikita is above all a dedicated learner. Nikita came on with a limited knowledge of front end programming and took on developing himself by working with his partner intern and asking the questions he needed to contribute effectively. By the end of his two months, Nikita conveyed a level of confidence with front end skills and pride in his work that left the team inspired. I am confident that Nikita will be a contribution to any team he joins in the future.”