About

Born in the late nineteen hundreds in Siberia, I migrated to the US at the turn of the millennium. Mathematician by birth but a software engineer by choice, I spent my formative years in front of the screen of a computer manipulating bits and bites, making things in digital space.

These days, I continue my career as a hands-on software engineer and people leader. Over the years, I have done innovative work for the DC Government, WorldBank, and the White House, helped with research at the University of Maryland and Hopkins, co-founded a tech startup, and worked for large companies such as Capital One and Google.

In the past, I have explored many creative outlets outside of software: electronics and Arduino tinkering, 3D printing, baking cakes and crepes, cooking a perfect Thai dish on a wok, collecting vintage and making mechanical keyboards of my own design, linocut/stamping/woodblock printing, composing and producing lo-fi hip-hop tracks, carpentry, and finer woodworking. Some of them stuck, but most of them didn't.

Lately, I have been spending more time woodworking (but still not enough). I started with rough carpentry and moved to finer woodworking. Now, I'm leaning from power to hand tools, incorporating traditional Japanese techniques and tools.

Artist Maker Statement

Am I an artist?
While some of my creative pursuits are clearly in the "art" category, I would say I always considered myself a "maker" first. In my mind, I'm at the beginning of the artist's journey, and to me, the process of creation, craft, and technique is as much fun as the final artefact - the art itself.

Why do I do what I do?
Like kids say these days, some of us need to go and "touch grass." And this is exactly what I do. Spending most of my life in the bits and bites/ cloud/virtual reality/internet (aka series of tubes), this is the way for me to detach from complex constructs that live in my head and touch the real world/life, enjoy the physicality of it. Moving from translating my ideas into software that is immaterial, towards to translating ideas into physical objects/"hardware" is the biggest (other) type of joy one can have.