The Beginning
I first encountered programming when I was around 11.
Back then, I had a sudden, intense burst of curiosity about computers, so I asked my dad to show me what this mysterious beast was all about.
He sat me down in front of the PC and, instead of firing up a game, started lecturing me about Bubble Sort. Yeah, that one—where elements bubble around like water in a kettle. And he made me write it in Visual Basic.
I obediently typed whatever my father dictated, trying to grasp the meaning of existence, attempting to answer his tricky questions... and then came the inevitable: "STAS, DON’T USE THE MOUSE! TYPE WITH THE KEYBOARD!" (Apparently, real men code blindfolded, one-handed). And so I kept typing. A harsh mentor.
Then came a stroke of luck—I was gifted an Arduino kit. Like a dutiful young engineer, I tried to follow the instructions to the letter. Learned how electronics worked... and birthed my first creation: a crawling corpse made of Lego and a servo motor. Honestly, it was my first step into robotics (and possibly necromancy). The horror-engineering school had begun.
Yandex Mob
In 6th or 7th grade, I got hooked on HTML and CSS. I became a crafter of simple little websites, where the main attraction was the background and table-based layouts held together by prayers. These digital Paleolithic masterpieces still gather dust on CodePen as monuments of their era.
Then, an opportunity arose at school: we needed an app for navigating the school—a monstrous labyrinth, a Minotaur’s maze for first-graders. I made a simple web guide. And then it hit me: "Wait, we need a mobile version!" In 9th grade, I dove headfirst into Android development. The pure, holy kind, without any of that Kotlin nonsense or "slow" frameworks like React Native (sorry, fans). I wrote the app, presented it at a school conference... and forever seared into my memory the pain of wrestling with Android Studio’s godforsaken layout system. It’s like solving a puzzle blindfolded while standing on one leg.
But it didn’t stop there. 10th grade, Yandex Lyceum. Signed up with my friend Andrey. We learned Python. First year—immersion in syntax and philosophy. I did Andrey’s homework while he grinded MMR in Dota selflessly helped my comrade keep up with the program. After the first year, Andrey dropped out (apparently, Dota calls louder), and I was left alone with a bunch of tiny geniuses from 8th and 9th grades (I, a 10th-grader, had somehow been allowed into this nursery of prodigies).
Then came the project: a PyGame game. We split into pairs. My fighting spirit was aflame: I proposed to my newly minted 8th-grade partner that we make a Doom clone! His response was succinct: "Too hard. Let’s do a 2D spaceship thing instead." Well, I thought, fine, we’ll battle Evil in the next life. Inspired, I drafted a game concept capable of revolutionizing Russian gamedev (by my humble estimation), and we began. I quickly whipped up movement, GUI, and collisions—the foundation!—and solemnly entrusted my partner with writing the game logic.
A week later, I opened the project... and what I saw would break any team lead, senior, or even an intern after three Red Bulls. This wasn’t logic. This was a masterpiece of legacy art: a monumental tower of if and else, built on shifting sands. Calm on the outside, I plunged into this surreal spaghetti-code world and just... rewrote it. In the end, the game existed. It worked. It almost met my expectations (key word: almost). But for fun, I also wrote a Doom engine. Take that, 8th-grader!
Next act—a Flask project. I created an online clothing store. The design? Honestly borrowed from a site selling anime T-shirts and other "geek swag." Shamelessly stealing design solutions is also a skill!
University
The era of grand experiments.
I dabbled in everything: worked in the "cyberzone" (where every PC had a 50/50 chance of taking flight from my tinkering), wrote cheats, built websites, and so much more.
First Year
Met C++. To hone my skills (and chase the thrill), I started writing game cheats. Reverse engineering with IDA Pro, offsets, external/internal cheats for CS... The highs were real! This was my dark side of the Force.
Second Year
Java. Oh God... My fate suddenly became downloading Minecraft mods. Gradle and other "heresies" felt like quantum physics back then. This was my "second grade" in the JVM world.
Third Year
Python, SQL, Linux, ML, DeepML, configuration management. Now this was cool.
In the first half of third year, I dove into ML. The highlight was training a standard transformer for a full day on a 1050TI, only for it to produce this genius line:
black cat lived lived was was . .
No GitHub link, sadly—I killed the SSD with static electricity.
Then came a GAN that generated faces straight out of your dreams.
I aced all tasks on kispython.ru (their CI/CD here: http://80.87.195.95:3000/, login/password were hilariously simple—like admin/1234) and basked in Judgement Day glory. Showed up, did TWO Python tasks... and got credit. Just me. In the whole group. Felt like Neo surrounded by confused Agent Smiths.
Fourth Year
Genius Snake.. Inspired by consoles and Assembler. Also competed in a CTF, landed ~200th place. Databases, Linux HYPRLAND I USE ARCH BTW, Docker, all that jazz.
Other fun projects:
- Apex Legend Cheats
Since my C++ wasn’t strong enough to bypass kernel anti-cheats, I revisited the forgotten Arduino, making a mouse emulator. More on that in a separate post.
Lived for a month. EA’s ban reason was dumb: "COMPETITIVE_ADVANTAGE." Guess my shot/hit ratio was too sus. - Valorant Colorbot
The dumbest yetdecentanti-cheat, Vanguard, couldn’t detect my emulator... until I forgot Arduino has a bootloader.
Lasted two weeks. Account got yeeted by reports.
Recently returned to web. Since I was Not Bad at FastAPI and backend DB stuff, I declared myself a Fullstack Dev (aka 10x Developer). Mastered Docker, embraced CI/CD, cooked up some conceptual sausage in Postgres and Linux.
And then, the moment of truth: time to dive into the cesspool called REACT FRONTEND DEVELOPMENT.
God, how many frameworks did they invent?! One trashes another, a third is declared obsolete, a fourth... Who even knows. I decided not to overcomplicate things and went with the classic—virtual DOM REACT))).
Wrote an app. Looked at the code:
const [newValue, setNewValue] = useState(0); const [nothing, setNothing] = useState(0); useEffect(() => { setNewValue(newValue + 1); setNewValue(newValue + 1); }, [nothing])
...and was floored. Set state twice, but newValue only increments by 1? Magic? Zuckerberg’s lizard black magic?
Discovered Lighthouse—because I’m a perfectionist. Ran it on my production (a humble VPS)... 73 SCORE??? ONE PAGE—73??? Like getting a "satisfactory" for a masterpiece. Read up on SSR and Next.js and settled on it.
Wat Now?
Working at a startup. Doing literally everything: from website dev to IoT projects. Currently figuring out microcontrollers but still doing Fullstack. Writing firmware for ESP32, soldering, studying Crossfire protocol... And looking back at it all—from bubbling sorts at 11 to crawling Lego corpses, CS cheats, React confusion, and flying hardware—I realize one simple thing:
I wouldn’t change a damn thing. My journey is glorious.
Here are the projects (pride, cringe, and tons of experience)::
- Personal
- Sky-Master
- Duckhacks
- Kali
- Rukodelnitsa (very englandish)
My stack of technologies:
- React (Next.js)
- HTML, TAILWIND, CSS, JavaScript
- FastAPI, MySQL, Postgres, SQLAlchemy, Redis, REST API, Архитектура делоть жиест, Rest API.
- ML, DeepML, PyTorch, TensorFlow (ненавижу), Scikit-learn, Matplotlib, Pandas, NumPy, Seaborn (чуть-чуть)
- Discord.py, aiogram, asyncio, asyncpg,
- Docker, Docker Compose, CI/CD, NGINX.
Telegram: https://t.me/daixe
