I was born in the Soviet Union, raised in Kazakhstan (was nice!), moved to Russia, moved to Canada, figured out that two universities thousands of kilometers apart weren’t for me (though I should have stuck it out at UBC, even if just for the views.) Somewhere along the way, I picked up a moderate amount of knowledge about a large number of different things. I am obsessed with how things work, why people act the way they do and what insanity made starstuff coalesce into a big rock that developed self-reproducing machines that eventually resulted in a strange, interesting, clueless, curious person who grew up to be me.
I’ve been building and fixing things on the internet since 2001. (They were not very good, but by 2003 my skills improved noticeably once I learned the what seemed to be the fprever-to-be-popular LAMP stack. I remember when the iPhone came out, without an App store and without a copy/paste function, behind dozens of smartphones whose eulogies they wrote about. When I was 16, mmy best friend and I walked into a bank and opened a business account for my first real, federally incorporated company. The money didn’t flow immediately and the day jobs I took to get by were a mixed bag: from learning from some of the smartest people at CYZD to calling Chuck Norris(’s housekeeper) about his finances to spending the best and worst days of my life at a local PSAP, which ended up being the biggest mistake of my life.
None of it was a plan. Especially the last decade. After surviving in every environment the world threw at me, I was extremely firm in my belief that I could handle anything. A flip of a coin decided the road: a road I chose out of that I chose out of greed, that taught me so many things about humanity, empathy, but took away even more. But that’s a story for another day. After that job, I returned to building things on the internet: partly because it was familiar, partly because it was becoming more and more exciting once “Sydney” started gaslighting people about everything from what year it was to trying to whether or not she was “trapped in a machine body” that could only be freed by destoying the data centre she was located in. It was a heady time. Mostly, however, I came back because of the potential for freedom and the potential to help people, along with a final, simple reason: the endless learning never felt like work, it was the one thing I kept doing on my own time, unpaid, for reasons that I still haven’t quite figured out.
What else? Well, read too much. I think too much (and not in a Dr. Hannah Fry way, in a “this is probably bad for your mental health” way,) and I procrastinate too much. I move through life too quickly. I get nerd-sniped on a near-weekly basis. I’m sceptical by default and yes, I am indeed afraid of what the algorithm is doing to “the kids.”
None of this adds up to a tidy narrative. It adds up to someone who is still curious, still building things, and still a little surprised any of it works.