Ruby on Rails developer since 2015, worked as a web designer for many years befor that. Have experience in building websites as both back-end and front-end and sometimes UI designer.
Slowly learning Rust. Building an online code school. Born in Moscow, currently living in Buenos Aires. Lived 5 years of total time since 2012 in Thailand and love it tenderly.
Skills
Design skills
Visual communications, structuring and presenting content
Composition & creating layouts
Web typography
Photo manipulation & illustration (banners etc.)
I can design simple landing pages as well as complex websites, redesign and code new layouts and new interfaces for existing projects.
Currently I am in Buenos Aires time zone, so I cannot attend all meetings in some time zones:
For this city’s TZ
I can be available at
Difference
Los Angeles
07:00 — 20:00 PDT
+4 hr
New York
10:00 — 23:00 EDT
+1 hr
Lisbon, London
15:00 — 04:00 WEST
−4 hr
Amsterdam, Berlin, Madrid, Paris, Warsaw
16:00 — 05:00 CEST
−5 hr
Kiev, Moscow
17:00 — 06:00 EEST
−6 hr
Bangkok
21:00 — 10:00
−10 hr
Hong Kong, Shanghai, Singapore
22:00 — 11:00 CST
−11 hr
Tokyo
23:00 — 12:00 JST
−12 hr
Melbourne
01:00 — 14:00 AEDT
−14 hr
Auckland
03:00 — 16:00 NZDT
−16 hr
Deal breakers
For various reasons I am not ready to work on some projects:
State owned
Gambling
Unethical animal treatment
Tobacco
Alcohol
Legal entity in Russia or Belarus
Woke, BLM & social justice etc.
Help enforce authoritarism, citizen surveillance etc.
Legal
How to send me money
Ideal
Cryptocurrency transfer (Monero, Bitcoin, Ethereum, USDC, etc.)
Good
SWIFT transfer to my personal bank account in Thailand Also WesternUnion transfer (yes)
Acceptable in circumstances yet to be discovered
SWIFT transfer to my legal entiry bank account in Russia
How to register our collaboration
Ideal
I work for you as a private person. We may or may not sign a contract.
Good
I work for you as an employee, we sign a contract. (Why is it “good” rather than “ideal”? Because you’ll probably have to pay a lot of taxes for hiring me. I’d prefer you give half of that money to me and leave the other half to yourself.)
Acceptable in circumstances yet to be discovered
We sign a contract, where my side is a registered Russian legal entity (individual entrepreneur).
I have nothing against NDA.
My humble open-source projects
I do not write open-source projects on purpose and don’t market them, I rather end up wrapping into a gem the code I have to use in several projects myself.
A dark color scheme for ActiveAdmin Ruby CMS. The dark theme automatically switches on / off with your system’s dark / light mode. You can override that on the browser level if you wish.
Making heavy parts of web pages asyncronous via Ajax
Purchase flows
Refactoring legacy code
Reviewing pull requests
RSpec tests
Setting tasks for team developers
Setting up asset build pipeline
Setting up web sites at Heroku
Upgrading gems in legacy Rails projects
Videocalls with client’s team
Website design
Writing custom Rails validators
Writing internal documentation and tech manuals
Interesting things I did on this job
Adopting ViewComponent for view isolation
Mentoring junior developers
Replacing Datatables with HotWire
Researching Git workflow patterns
Solution engineering
Technical leadership of a team of developers
Web page performance optimization
Working remotely from another time zone
What I discovered while working here
With small number of endpoints, GraphQL will only make it longer
Most documented Git flows are worse than what we have been using
Clients of an IT service agency are happy with ridiculously long time of development, huge checks and lots of empty video calls just because they don’t know any better
A client may spend months adjusting shades of colors on a project before publishing it
This job was semi-remote. I worked from Bangkok TZ, the team was in Moscow TZ.
The company aggregates and mediates booking of escape rooms worldwide (but more in Russia). Also has a number of businesses completely unrelated to quest rooms.
The company owns several websites that aggregate escape rooms and other entertainment events. The IT team varies from 2 to 5 people, working both from office and remotely.
Typical tasks
Adding responsiveness to legacy pages
Back-end with Ruby on Rails
Background jobs for Sidekiq
Capybara tests
Creating filter search
Customizing forms & index layouts in ActiveAdmin
Front-end develpment (HTML, CSS, JS)
Making heavy parts of web pages asyncronous via Ajax
Refactoring legacy code
RSpec tests
Setting up web sites at Heroku
Upgrading gems in legacy Rails projects
Website design
Writing custom Rails validators
Interesting things I did on this job
Adapting pre-built front-end templates to Rails
Creating stand-alone websites for marketing campaigns
Creating Telegram bots
Web page performance optimization
Working remotely from another time zone
What I discovered while working here
If you do everything against good practices, your project can still be maintainable, correcly working and profitalble
Escape rooms is an unexpectedly large market (mostly in Russia)
A website is not a business without lead generation
People outside of programming have no idea how easily their daily work can be fully automated
The more vague and undetailed a task is set, the more authorship I feel, and the more exciting it is to work on
Some projects would start in the dark and keep accumulating data for months just to gain strong SEO ranking
Founder, Ruby dev, Front-end dev, Web designerat Integral Design
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This job was fully remote. I worked from Bangkok TZ, the client was in Moscow TZ.
A small remote web development agency focused on landings, online education projects and sites for small business.
During this time I refined Sass-based design (almost no Photoshop, Bootstrap right from the start), learnt Rails, created a couple of personal projects, including well selling digital product.
Typical tasks
Adding responsiveness to legacy pages
Automatic deployment pipeline via Heroku
Back-end with Ruby on Rails
Background jobs for Sidekiq
Capybara tests
CMS development
Creating filter search
Customizing forms & index layouts in ActiveAdmin
Digital creative design (web banners, promo materials etc.)
Front-end develpment (HTML, CSS, JS)
Integrating external data provider by API
Photo retouching
Purchase flows
RSpec tests
Setting up web sites at Heroku
Website design
Writing custom Rails validators
Interesting things I did on this job
Adopting ViewComponent for view isolation
Creating a custom deployment tool for VPS
Creating Ruby gems
Setting up VPS on DigitalOcean with Chef
Web page performance optimization
Web scraping with Nokogiri & Capibara
Working remotely from another time zone
What I discovered while working here
Without lead generation a business in just a fantasy, and will soon return to nothing
I worked in a marketing team and was the only designer in the CIS office. I maintained the only 2 official Sony’s websites in Russia — sony.ru and sonystyle.ru (now renamed to store.sony.ru).
Knowing no programming languages yet, I created a shop locator service for Sony Centre stores across Russia based on vanilla CGI-include technique. I also regularly created (designed and coded) stand-alone promotional mini-websites describing some campaigns.
Typical tasks
Digital creative design (web banners, promo materials etc.)
Front-end develpment (HTML, CSS, JS)
Print graphic design (stationary, leaflets etc.)
Website design
Interesting things I did on this job
Creating interactive banners with Flash
Creating stand-alone websites for marketing campaigns
Visiting remote cities of Russia wth inspection
What I discovered while working here
Employees at big shiny corporations sometimes are as incometent as it can get
Centralized procedures can make simple changes almost impossible to implement
Being terribly ineffective on the inside, a business can remain afloat and profitable for very long
A small web studio of ~20 people, now closed. The main focus was creating and maintaining websites, although sometimes we took video production, stationary, branding, print design etc.
Disappointed with the low speed of creating web graphics in Photoshop I experimented with designing websites only in Illustrator (which was better), and then after digging into more advanced typography (Bringhurst) embraced InDesign-based workflow with embedded graphics created in Photoshop and Illustrator.
Typical tasks
Creating vector illustrations
Digital creative design (web banners, promo materials etc.)
Customer support, interpreter, web designerat Ювелла
—
This job was office-only.
The company run an online casino for US customers and also owned several unrelated offline businesses.
I came as an interpreter and customer support staff, but eventually learnt web design and a little HTML / CSS, and started participating in web design tasks, doing most of it myself by the end of my work there.