About

Hi! I'm Ilya, a web and mobile developer based in Barcelona, Spain.

I got into programming because of video games. As a kid, I loved drawing and wanted to animate my characters, so I taught myself 3D Max. I made a short cartoon at school and even got an award for it. But at some point I realized that animating characters is not as interesting as making them move, jump and shoot. So I started learning game development.

When I was around 12, I met a guy on a game dev forum. We talked on Skype every day and kept trying to make our own games. We never finished any — we had too many ideas and not enough experience. And of course, we made the classic mistake of building a game engine instead of the actual game.

Game development stayed my hobby for years. But when it came time to find a real job, making games in my city wasn't an option. The closest thing was building websites. That's how web development became my profession.

The university years

At university, I mostly skipped lectures and spent my time in the basement robotics lab, building a self-driving car with Arduino and Raspberry Pi. I convinced some people that we should make a mobile game for a robotics festival, got a small office at the business incubator, assembled a team, and built the game in collaboration with one of the largest mobile carriers in Russia.

People played it on tablets at the festival and on a huge sensor table in the university library. I'm still proud of that one.

Around the same time we made Lucky Train — a 2D platformer trying to capture the vibe of Russian railroads. Strange people, their strange habits, their strange tasks for the player. It caught the attention of Russian Railways, who showed us on TV and wrote an article about the game and the team.

Funding farmers, then moving west

A couple of years after university, I helped design a platform for a regional agricultural fund — a service where local farmers could present their finances and get funding for their households. I designed the technical part, pitched the idea, and two months later the product was live and farmers were getting real money for their development.

What I'm building now

Since then I've worked with companies in the UK and US, mostly building React apps, and eventually moved from Russia to Spain — a long journey through a couple of countries that took about two years.

Right now I'm building Hinode — a full Linux desktop with a dedicated GPU for AI creators.

I write about AI automation and generative workflows using n8n and ComfyUI, web and mobile development with React and React Native, and the productivity tricks I pick up along the way. If any of this sounds interesting, consider subscribing. Hope to see you around! 👋