About Me

I was six years old when I first touched a computer. It was a ZX Spectrum clone, and I had absolutely no idea what I was doing. The thing had a rubber keyboard, made weird noises when loading games from cassette tapes, and crashed constantly. I was hooked.

Those early days were pure magic. No internet, no tutorials, just a kid poking at BASIC commands, trying to make the screen do something interesting. I'd spend hours typing in programs from magazines, hunting for typos when they inevitably didn't work. Every successful "HELLO WORLD" felt like a moon landing.

Then came the PC era. 386, 486, Pentium. I remember upgrading RAM like it was a religious experience. Windows 3.1 gave way to Windows 95, and suddenly there was this thing called the Internet. Dial-up modems singing their robot songs, waiting five minutes for a single image to load. It was slow, it was frustrating, and it changed everything.

The early 2000s hit different. Forums, IRC, early blogs, the wild west of the web. I was in university studying computer science at Bauman Moscow State Technical University, but the real education was happening online. Learning from strangers across the world, contributing to open source, staying up until 4 AM arguing about code formatting. Good times.

Building Things That Matter

I started in publishing tech, building test automation frameworks that replaced weeks of manual clicking with scripts that ran overnight. There's something deeply satisfying about watching a machine do in minutes what used to take days. That's when I learned that the best code isn't clever — it's code that lets people go home on time.

Then I fell into fintech, and it changed how I think about software. When you're building systems that handle real money — people's paychecks, their savings, their mortgage payments — you develop a different relationship with error handling. Every edge case matters. Every null pointer is someone's rent not going through. I spent years migrating ancient codebases to modern architectures, turning monoliths into microservices, and learning that "boring" infrastructure work is anything but.

These days I work on banking platforms, mentoring developers and still writing code daily. Fifteen years in, and I still get that rush when a complex system clicks into place. The stack keeps evolving every year and every month — but the fundamentals stay the same: understand the problem, write clean code, make it work, make it right, make it fast.

The AI Moment

We're living through something big. The rise of large language models and AI isn't just another tech trend — it's a fundamental shift in how we build software and solve problems. I've seen a few waves in my career: the web, mobile, cloud. This one feels different. Bigger.

The developers who thrive won't be the ones who ignore it or fear it. They'll be the ones who adapt quickly, who learn to work alongside these tools, who understand both the possibilities and the limitations. The world is changing fast, and the ability to learn and adapt has never been more valuable than your current skill set.

I'm still that kid with the ZX Spectrum, poking at things to see what happens. The tools have changed, but the curiosity hasn't. And honestly? The best part is that there's always more to learn.

— Mikhail