About me

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.

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 managed to convince some people at the university that we should make a mobile game for a robotics festival. We got a small office at the business incubator, assembled a team, and built the game in collaboration with MTS, 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. That was amazing, I'm proud of that experience. After the festival, we kept developing the game and even added online mode to it.

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. The game caught the attention of Russian Railroads — they showed us on TV and wrote an article about the game and the team. That was cool.

I also co-founded a student community at the university where I mentored people in web development and helped many of them land their first jobs.

A couple years after university, I participated in a contest where we designed 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, presented the idea to the fund, and we signed a contract. Two months later the product was live and local farmers were getting millions of rubles for their development. That was my first real taste of the full cycle: pitching, negotiating, managing a team, and shipping something that actually mattered to people.

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

Right now I'm building KeyDown — a typing trainer that speeds up learning by adapting to your weak spots. I also have Learn Cat on the back burner — an app for learning Spanish and Catalan. Catalan is the local language here in Catalonia, and there's not much on the market for learning it. It's a big project and I don't have enough resources for it right now, but I'll get to it someday. I had a change to pitch Learn Cat at 4YFN at Tech Barcelona stand.

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