Before 2005

It all started in 1993, when 5 years old me somehow persuaded my dad to buy me a Soviet clone of ZX-Spectrum. It cost 30000 Karbovantsy, which was almost the same as dad's monthly salary (also, it equaled ≈25 US Dollars). A couple of years later, I started learning Sinclair Basic, and at age 10 I wrote a couple of silly games and something like a piano simulator.

In my first school, I learned some Turbo Pascal and enjoyed writing programs in my copybook, because neither I nor my school had a proper IBM PC yet. When I turned 14, I switched schools (the new one actually had computers in the informatics classroom) and my parents bought me a Celeron-based PC. From day one I had Windows 98 and Mandrake Linux installed there in dual-boot, and I spent most of my winter holidays writing "15 puzzle" game in Delphi. A couple of years later, when my HDD got partially damaged and I couldn't install Windows on it, I fully switched to Linux and started learning Python and Qt.

Despite the fact that I genuinely enjoyed programming, most of my computer enthusiasm came from the fact that there was absolutely nothing to do in Luhansk, so after finishing school I moved to Kharkiv, which is a major university center and the 2nd largest city in Ukraine.

2005-2010: University of Radioelectronics, Kharkiv

(BSc, Computer Engineering; major: Systems Programming)

KNURE (which is short for Kharkiv National Uni of RadioElectronics) is considered to be the best CS/EE university in the area, and that's why most of the computer nerds from Eastern Ukraine end up there. I believe this is the main advantage of the "offline" universities over MOOCs and other "online" schools: you can meet other enthusiasts, grow some network, get acquainted with the potential employers and so on. Pretty soon I got bored with "Introduction to programming" courses, meet some people at the faculty, started attending the algorithms learning group. Eventually, this got me into a summer intership at Aldec (see below), which then became a part-time employment, and eventually – a full time job. At that time I was young and stupid, and considered working in the industry so much superior to the university studies; that's why even though I got admitted to Masters program free of charge after getting my BSc degree, I ended up dropping it eventually.

2006-2012: Aldec

TBD

..

2012-2014: Globallogic

TBD

2014-2021: Grid Dynamics

TBD

2021-now: Roq.ad

TBD