Senior Frontend Engineer. AI Engineer. Judoka.

My story: from the engine room to the codebase

Two things have been with me since childhood. Judo, since I was four. And technology, since I was twelve.

I grew up in Moldavanka, a neighborhood in Odessa with a rough edge to it. It was an easy place to drift the wrong way, and plenty of kids I knew did. Judo pulled me the other way. My parents and my coaches didn't just teach me to fight. They built a backbone in me. Through school and university I became a Ukrainian champion, medaled at national and international tournaments, and won my city and region many times over.

At the same time, I was falling in love with computers. It started with a gaming magazine and 3D software. I wanted to make Pixar-style animated films in Maya and 3ds Max, until rendering a single frame on the hardware I could afford became impossible. In my teenage years I read an article on how to build a website, and I started teaching myself. No courses. Trial and error. First sites for myself, then for friends, then for sports clubs.

I wanted to study this for real. But there was no path for it where I lived, and my parents wanted something stable, the sea. So I became a marine engineer instead. Good money, new countries, the life they hoped for me. For more than a decade I worked the engine room, six months at a time.

But a ship is a floating prison. I couldn't sit still. The whole time, in every spare hour, at sea and back home, I kept two things alive: training, and code. I started with PHP and Laravel on the backend. Then came the language of the browser, JavaScript, and around 2014 I moved fully into frontend, first jQuery, then AngularJS. When Angular arrived, TypeScript came with it, and that's where everything clicked. The thing I had fallen in love with as a teenager had grown up with me.

After my last contract, I finally made the decision I had been putting off for years: to do what I actually love. I finished frontend engineering courses focused on Angular, and started the career I'm in today.

The sea wasn't my calling. It was a long detour. Judo and engineering were always the constants, and today they point in the same direction. Now I build enterprise-scale frontend systems in Germany, design architecture for large Nx monorepos and microfrontends, and build my own products with AI tooling. A strong spirit gets up to win. That's what the mat taught me, and it's what I bring to every system I build.