I will build the whole product, or a part of it

Three rounds of formal education in computing: a vocational college, a bachelor’s degree and a master’s. On top of that, in my last years at school I finished a three-year course at a private computer academy. As an adult I have gone back to private courses more than once, to top things up and to shake the rust off.

Since IT was a hobby, my childhood idea of fun was building and tinkering with uCoz sites. There was a spell of writing and patching Lua scripts for S.T.A.L.K.E.R., and server and client plugins for Minecraft in Java. Around the latter my childhood friends and I built a whole project: an account area with sign-up through the site, an in-game shop, payment provider integrations (JavaScript, C++) and our own exclusive client and server plugins (Java).

Later, at 16, I started work as a designer at a television channel. Animation followed, and I did both of those as a freelancer as well — somewhere in that stretch I made an ad for Hustle Castle — without giving up IT as a hobby. How so? It happened the way it happened. Yes, I put off entering professional software by a few years; on the other hand I collected a great deal of experience in a field I enjoyed, worked on both my soft and my hard skills, and arrived in software with a better eye than I would have had otherwise.

Just before kicking the door in I got to work on three GTA 5 projects. Two of them closed before release, sadly, but one became fairly popular.

After that I kept building up the hard skills and freelancing, and at the end of the year joined a large international outsourcing company, where I spent six months across two products before it announced it was leaving Russia.

Straight afterwards I found a permanent place on a large healthcare project. Around 15 regions of Russia used the product, with millions of patients and thousands of doctors on it.

I carried on learning, and a couple of years later was headhunted by a telecoms company for a corporate messenger and video conferencing product. Tens of thousands of employees used what we built, at companies across oil, finance, construction and the rest.

Fairly recently I decided I wanted a little more variety in my work, which is why I am open to client inquiries again