ITExpert

ITExpert is a full-cycle recruitment company that has been helping partners such as Deloitte, Ring, and others with industry-best professionals in the field of software development/engineering for more than 8 years.
We are used to working under time-constrained conditions. We believe in recruiting you need to work fast, although without compromising quality.

Customer needs and convenience above all!

Co-Founder

Deloitte

Deloitte’s R&D department, a division of the audit firm, was searching for a recruitment ally to establish its inaugural office and bolster its hiring squad. This department is engaged in project development for Deloitte’s internal clientele and its offices globally, focusing on the candidates’ proficiency and experience during recruitment.
In collaboration with the recruitment team from ITExpert, Deloitte has effectively onboarded more than 80 competent professionals, including Software Engineers, DevOps, QA engineers, Cybersecurity experts, IT auditors, and other IT specialists. The successful launch of Deloitte’s R&D department is a testament to our fruitful partnership.

Tech Recruiting Consultant

BNP Paribas

Our team helps build a new team of IT developers to develop new banking products.

Verbit.ai

The Verbit Company serves as an essential partner to 2,000+ businesses and institutions. Verbit’s vertical-built voice AI solutions provide its partners with the tools they need to offer engaging and equitable experiences that not only meet accessibility guidelines, but make verbal information searchable and actionable. In just a few years since its founding in 2017, Verbit has grown into a unicorn company with a $2B valuation and a global presence. Verbit employs the largest professional captioner workforce in the world and has emerged as the leader in the $30B transcription industry.

Erste Bank und Sparkasse

Our team has helped to find several IT specialists in the IT department of Erste Bank

Ring

Ring is now a part of Amazon, but when we started cooperating, the startup was just at the beginning of its journey. The company searched for key performers who would develop the product and quickly show results in all major areas: Product, Mobile, Backend, and Frontend.

ITExpert's recruitment team has successfully filled all needed vacancies for Ring. The company soon attracted $160 million in investment. A year later, Amazon bought it for $1 billion.

As co-founder of ITExpert, I have a passion for connecting top tech talent with amazing companies in the US, Canada, Brazil, Mexico, the UK, Poland, Romania, Portugal, Ukraine and other European countries. For over 8 years, I have been involved in managing and recruiting teams, teaching and mentoring newbies, and filling roles for Deloitte, Ring (Amazon), Verbit, Emerson, Erste Bank, BNP Paribas, Sisense and others.

🎯I started my career in 2015 when I co-founded ITExpert with a vision to match the best developers with the coolest companies. Now, I help businesses scale and succeed by coordinating our external recruitment team of 40 tech Recruiters with expertise in FinTech, Web3, E-commerce, SaaS and PaaS products, Machine Learning, AI, and others.
 
If you need help with setting up your IT-recruitment process, getting management advice on team leading, recruitment, and HRM, or outsourcing your open positions to professional recruiters, I'm here to assist you.✌

📧 You can email me at ihor.shykhov@itexperts.work
| Check out the website: https://itexpert.work/ |

Ihor Shykhov

Cosmin Rusu

Transforming Visions into AI MVPs & Products | Founder @Duty Ventures | Ex {Google, Apple and Amazon}

Hi, I’m Cosmin, the Founder and Lead Engineer of Duty Ventures. 

After some experience as a software developer in companies such as Google, Apple, and Amazon, I decided to launch my project.

With several former colleagues and college friends, we launched our own startup specializing in software development for entrepreneurs and customers needing software development services. 

Duty Ventures is all about developing software products from start to finish, thanks to the experiences we have all acquired in the past years.

One of our most successful services is aimed at entrepreneurs and early-stage founders, for whom we provide an MVP-builder service getting their product from 0 to 1 within weeks!

However, our services are not limited to that. The teams we create do much more than just create MVPs and are able to adapt to the different technologies requested, all of this in an agile way.

Our most recurrent services are the following:
- MVP creation
- Custom Software Development
- Blockchain Development
- Mobile Development
- Checkout pages
- E-Commerce

And our most used technologies are:
- Ruby on Rails
- React
- React Native
- Java
- NodeJS


If you want to learn more about how we can help you, head over to: https://dutyventures.com


Phone: (+1) 669 200 9568 / (+40) 754 973 314
Email: cosmin@dutyventures.com

Founder & Lead software engineer

I'm leading a software development agency focused on fast iterations. Most of our clients are shipping more features, responding faster to support tickets, and have accelerated growth because of us.

We focused on HealthCare a lot lately due to the accelerated digitalization in this industry. I am a strong believer that we can make healthcare more technically advanced via pure software. 

In terms of technologies, our previous projects involved Ruby on Rails, React, React Native, Scala, Java, Kubernetes, GCP, AWS (ECS, RDS, AKS), Stripe Connect, HIPAA compliance.

Some of our previous clients: 
- Spotify
- Colgate
- Go4Ellis (incl. HIPAA compliance)
- KindBody (+1 HIPAA)
- NXT Sports
- Noom (Healthcare)
- Mochila Fulfillment
- 3Step
- Mylk Guys (YCombinator)
- NLV Productions
- SH Technologies
- One Step Software (Techstars)
- Ergodic Labs
- Med Prep
- Testing Psych
- Abundance Digital
- Tookitaki

We just made a new hire. He doesn't have a proper name yet.

But he's already doing the work nobody wants to do: checking deadlines, scanning GitHub, pinging developers for updates, asking why that feature took 3x longer than expected, and giving our clients a clear picture of what's happening in their projects.

Basically, he runs Software Delivery ops for us.

The catch? He's not human. He's an AI agent.

And honestly, he's more consistent than most project managers I've worked with. No ego, no missed standups, no "I forgot to update the ticket."

If this works out (and so far it is), we're bringing in a few of his friends. He says he knows some agents who do marketing and business development.

I'll keep you posted on how the team grows.

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AI-forward engineers. Embedded fast. Delivering from day one. | Founder @Duty Ventures | Ex {Google, Apple and Amazon}

Anthropic just played the smartest marketing move in AI.

While OpenAI announced ads are coming to ChatGPT, Anthropic did the opposite - they ran a Super Bowl ad saying Claude will stay ad-free.

But that's not even the best part.

They started sponsoring Google search results for developer error messages and stack traces that return zero results.

Think about it: you're debugging at 2 AM, you paste an error into Google, nothing comes up - and right there is Claude offering to help.

That's not advertising. That's solving a real problem at the exact moment of frustration.

The marketing lesson here is massive:

Don't interrupt people. Show up where they already need you.

Most companies spend millions trying to grab attention from people who don't care. Anthropic spent it reaching developers at their most desperate moment - when no other solution exists.

This is the difference between push marketing and pull marketing done right.

What's the smartest developer-targeted ad you've seen?

Stop paying for ngrok. There's a better alternative.

Meet zrok - an open-source tunneling tool built on zero-trust networking principles.

Why I switched:

1. Free subdomains - no paying for stable URLs
2. Open source - self-host it or use their free SaaS tier
3. Built on OpenZiti - actual zero-trust security, not just marketing buzzwords
4. Supports public AND private shares
5. Auto HTTPS/TLS out of the box
6. Custom domains supported

If you're a developer who regularly needs to expose local services (demos, webhooks, testing) - ngrok's free tier feels increasingly restrictive.

zrok gives you what you actually need without hitting a paywall every 5 minutes.

The setup is straightforward. The docs are solid. And because it's open source, you can inspect every line of code handling your traffic.

In a world where we're tunneling more and more traffic for dev and testing, having a free and secure option matters.

Check it out:

zrok.io

Home - zrok by NetFoundry

A friend of mine had his first meeting with a potential client in Germany.

He didn't prepare a pitch deck. Didn't try to "understand the project." Didn't walk through his company's services.

Instead, he asked one question:

"If I fly from Romania to Germany on Friday, can we meet face to face?"

They said yes instantly.

That was 5 years ago. They're still working together.

Here's what most agencies get wrong: they lead with capabilities. "We do React, we do mobile, we do cloud."

Nobody cares.

What founders actually want to know is: will this person show up when it matters?

The best business relationships I've seen didn't start with a scope of work. They started with someone proving they gave a damn before the contract was signed.

If you're choosing between a partner with a perfect proposal and one who'll get on a plane for you — pick the plane.

Cosmin Ionut

For years, I thought the best way to create more value for clients was to charge less.

Lower rate = more value for their money. Simple math, right?

Wrong.

Here's what actually happened when I charged less:

→ Clients treated the work as disposable
→ My team felt undervalued, so they gave B-level effort
→ I attracted price-shoppers who churned the fastest
→ We couldn't invest in better processes, tooling, or talent

The moment I started charging what the work was actually worth, everything changed.

Clients were more engaged. More committed. More respectful of timelines.

My team felt ownership because the stakes matched the effort.

And the clients who stayed? They became long-term partners, not one-off projects.

If you're a founder evaluating dev partners and your main filter is "who's cheapest" — you're optimizing for the wrong thing.

The most expensive mistake isn't paying too much. It's paying too little for a team that doesn't care enough to get it right.

This is the future! 🧑‍💻 + 💻👾💻👾💻👾 = 🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀

We were used to 10x engineers - now we'll likely see a lot of 20x engineers building 20x companies in a few months. Suddenly, whenever you have an idea, you don't need to spend a lot of time building it, then selling it... You can jump straight into selling it while the AI agents are busy building the product, improving it based on user feedback, and implementing all the custom features that a client needs - it's really mind-blowing...

Product-minded Devs | Founder @Duty Ventures | Ex {Google, Apple and Amazon}

I closed the loop.

I now have a full AI dev pipeline running end-to-end:

→ Claude Code: ideates features + writes exact specs
→ Linear: receives those specs automatically (clean, structured tickets)
→ Me: reviews and prioritizes inside Linear
→ Cursor Agent: implements the ticket and pushes code to GitHub
→ Cubic.dev + Qodo.ai + custom Claude Code PR Reviewer: review the PRs before merge

No chaos.
No “AI wrote it so ship it.”
No regressions flying under the radar.

Just a system that turns:
idea → spec → execution → review

This isn’t “one AI tool”.

It’s an orchestra of AIs.
And I’m the maestro.

Want to see exactly how I run it?

Comment DEV and I’ll send you a walkthrough of my dev process.

(We have to be connected)

Hot take on vibe coding:

If frontend is mostly about calling APIs, and those APIs should be secure by default - does vibe coding make the most sense on the frontend?

Think about it. The frontend is essentially a curl wrapper. A UI layer. Less security risk.

Here's where I think things are heading:

Senior engineers will migrate towards building secure backends. Modular, composable backend "components" that can easily interact with each other.

Open-source microservices you can plug and play.

Need auth? Spin up your own Auth0-like instance. Need user-generated content? Spin up a UGC microservice - posts, comments, likes, replies, threads. The same patterns we use on LinkedIn, Facebook, X.

You reuse what exists. Then you generate your own microservice for what's specific to your product.

And once you become big enough? You open source it.

The frontend becomes the place where AI can truly shine - generating UIs, connecting to secure APIs, iterating on design fast.

The backend stays the domain of engineers who understand security, data, and system design.

Vibe coding isn't replacing developers. It's splitting the role in two.

Funny how much attention still goes to glossy web design.

You'd think every important detail in your product boils down to some Pantone color code or hero graphic above the fold.

I know founders who obsess about the shade of a PNG, but haven't checked if their signup actually works.

It takes five seconds to make a slick mockup. Less to copy a homepage from any trendy open-source kit. 

Looks impressive in a deck. Zero use in production with half-baked onboarding and buggy forms.

Ugly websites can be clunky and dodgy. Seen plenty. Usually e-commerce scams or legacy hospital portals.

But there’s this myth in tech circles: appearances trump everything under the hood.

Ask someone burned by conversion dropoffs from a UI update how useful design awards feel at 2am cleaning up a backend meltdown.

People cheat metrics chasing aesthetics.

The peak irony? More leads bounce because of slow loading times, dead links, or convoluted account flows than mediocre typography. Anyone checking real funnel metrics gets this.

Solid products keep the real unspectacular gears *moving authorization, payments, workflows*. Peace of mind in operation mode beats pretty-color dopamine hits.

Seen too many falling for shimmer over function.

Distraction never fixes fundamentals.

Heroku just entered "maintenance mode."

Except this time, it's not your app - it's the entire platform.

Salesforce announced Heroku is transitioning to a "sustaining engineering model." Translation: no new features, no new enterprise contracts, just keeping the lights on.

If you've been a developer long enough, you know what this means. Standing still in tech is the same as moving backward.

Here's the thing though - Heroku's ideas won.

Every git push deploy. Every platform that "just works." Vercel, Render, Railway, Fly - they all carry Heroku's DNA.

The lesson for anyone building software products:

Your product can pioneer a category and still lose if the parent company stops investing. Innovation without sustained commitment is just a head start for your competitors.

If you're still running on Heroku - your apps are fine for now. But start planning your next move.

The platform that taught us what great developer experience looks like deserved better stewardship.

"We spend $XX,XXX/month on LLMs" is the new "we hired 200 people in 6 months."

Both sound impressive until the board asks: what did we actually get for it?

The smartest teams I see aren't spending more on AI. They're spending less, and ACTUALLY shipping more.

Unpopular opinion: most people using AI to build apps have no business deploying anything to production.

A 20-year sysadmin just quit his job this week. Not burnout. Not pay. His company offered bonuses for the best "vibe coded" app and got a tsunami of shadow IT - unsecured apps, unvetted AI agents on corporate machines, and a team of THREE sysadmins drowning under "innovation" built by people who can't explain what their own code does. When he raised security concerns? Debated. Overruled. Approved anyway. Because a VP saw a demo and got excited.

Copying ChatGPT output into production doesn't make someone an engineer. It makes them a liability with a deployment pipeline. A CTO in the thread admitted his marketing team had secretly built 11 apps - one storing customer data in a public S3 bucket. Eleven apps. Zero reviews. This is where we are now.

The predictable response: "That's just gatekeeping. Engineers are afraid AI will replace them." No. Good engineers use AI daily. The difference is they can read it, debug it, secure it, and explain it to an auditor. AI didn't lower the barrier to building software. It lowered the barrier to building dangerous software. Most organizations can't tell the difference until something breaks, leaks, or lands on a regulator's desk.

That sysadmin isn't the problem. He's the canary. Companies will keep ignoring people like him until they're explaining to a regulator why customer data ended up on the open internet because Dave from accounting "had a great idea for an app."

Stop handing out innovation awards. Start asking who's going to maintain it, secure it, and answer for it when it fails.

Open article: From the sysadmin community on Reddit by reddit.com

Palantir is no longer just “another AI stock”, but the perfect example of how technology, geopolitics, and investor greed intersect in 2026.

In a world where stock markets are two steps away from all-time highs and everyone is hunting for “the next Nvidia”, Palantir has just reported its best results of the last decade: 25 cents per share and 1.3 billion USD in quarterly revenues, with the stock up 11% on the day.
More interesting than the numbers, however, is Alex Karp’s message: “the results are pure and unmanipulated” – a sentence that says more about the fear in the market than about investor peace of mind.

Palantir is growing in a very uncomfortable place: at the intersection of government money, security, and near-total surveillance. Around 500 million of its quarterly revenues come directly from the state – military, agencies, ICE – in a context where “more geopolitical chaos” paradoxically means “more Palantir”.
If it manages to replicate this model in as many governments as possible, a single man (Peter Thiel) could end up knowing in real time what millions of people are doing, from their taxes to their personal lives.

At the same time, we see a familiar pattern: investors are selling the healthy winners and buying “the rest”, exactly as happened in crypto – Bitcoin stayed high, but many altcoins disappeared or crashed from hundreds of dollars to just a few.
The AI boom is starting to look more and more like a desperate race “not to miss the train”: companies over-investing, CEOs justifying spending with “paper money”, and a market that hopes the story will last long enough.

In conclusion, this feels like the essence of this moment: Palantir wins if the world becomes more chaotic, because it is the company that promises to bring order and to say “who is good and who is bad”.
The question for us, as investors and as people working in technology, is not just “how much more can Palantir grow?”, but “how comfortable are we with a future where AI becomes the moral, economic, and geopolitical arbiter?”

AI made me do it! Built in ~15 minutes 🤯

This is scary: GeoSpy AI tracks your exact location from a social media photo in 2 seconds.

The process can't be simpler:

1. Upload any photo.
2. Get precise GPS coordinates.
3. Displayed in 3D Street View

No metadata needed. No EXIF data. Just pixels.

You can track down the location using ChatGPT too.
But GeoSpy takes it 10 steps further:

☑ It reads architecture, vegetation & lighting.
☑ It narrows from country → city → street in secs.
☑ The advanced model claims ~1-meter accuracy.

We are entering a new era of visual surveillance:

☑ A selfie can expose your exact home address.
☑ AI analyzes pixels you didn't know carried cues.
☑ Street-level 3D accuracy. In under 2 minutes.

Think twice before posting a "casual" photo.

Amazon just sent me an email recommending stuff I didn't even know I needed yet.

I have Alexa integrated into my smart home setup. They basically know every device I own. So when they email me with a product recommendation, it's weirdly accurate.

This is signal-based selling in its purest form. And the best part? It works. I ordered the thing within 2 minutes.

Here's what most people miss about this: it's not about having the cheapest price. A lot of times, simplicity and peace of mind beats the cheapest offer on the market.

I would gladly pay a bit extra just to hit that "Buy Now" button on Amazon. Because what's the alternative? Find something cheaper on a random website, create a new account, add my credit card, fill in the delivery address, billing address, come up with a strong password?

No thanks. I'll pay the Amazon tax.

If you're a founder thinking about retention and conversion, this is the lesson: make buying from you so easy that going elsewhere feels like work.

So if AI will write code, and we treat that as a commodity, and as a pure blackbox inputs / outputs type of thing - what's next? Maybe we fully automate QA? Maybe we fully automate a simulation on how that code would interact with actual users? So we "simulate" a real world usage of an app / a website over time to find bugs / issues? Then, what next?

2018 Software Engineering problems: waiting for the build to finish

2026 Software Engineering problems: "You've hit your limit · resets 12pm (UTC)"

Better problems?

Marc Andreessen on how to get people to join your 3-person startup:

You have exactly 2 tools - stock options and vision.

Stock options they'll tell you aren't worth anything. So it really comes down to vision.

The best founders can explain how the world is going to look in a way that's so compelling, people leave Google and Microsoft to build it with them.

It's essentially sales. Selling to employees.

But here's the part most founders miss:

Hiring is also a self-selection process. The best companies are polarizing on purpose. They give a stark picture of what they are and what they aren't.

"We work 18-hour days - if that's not you, don't come."
"We go home at 5 every day - if that frustrates you, don't come."
"We do yoga as a company - if that's weird to you, don't come."

The founders who try to be everything to everyone end up hiring people who leave in 3 months.

The ones who are radically honest about their culture? They attract true believers.

Running a staff augmentation agency, I see this daily. The clients who know exactly what culture they're building find the right talent 10x faster.

Someone replicated Monday.com's core features in 60 minutes using AI.

Cost: $15.

Monday's stock took a hit. People panicked.

But here's the thing nobody's talking about:

Code has been getting cheaper for 20 years. AI just made the trend impossible to ignore.

If your entire business defensibility is "we built an app," you were already vulnerable. AI just made it obvious.

The real moat was never the code. It's:

→ Deep understanding of a specific customer problem
→ Product decisions that reflect real usage, not assumptions
→ An architecture that actually scales when users show up
→ A team that iterates based on data, not vibes

I see founders still spending months planning features that an AI tool could scaffold in an afternoon. And I see Silicon Valley founders shipping AI-generated MVPs that fall apart the moment real users touch them.

Both are missing the point.

The winners will be the ones who combine fast tooling with sharp product thinking.

Code is a commodity. Product judgment is not.

taplio

The Battle

Ihor Shykhov

Cosmin Rusu

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taplio

The Battle

Ihor Shykhov

Cosmin Rusu

Followers

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Engagements

Likes

Performance Score.css-goub6s{font-size:var(--chakra-fontSizes-md);font-weight:500;color:var(--chakra-colors-gray-600);display:block;margin-top:var(--chakra-space-1);}Cosmin Rusu's LinkedIn Performance

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