About

I've been making things work better for 17 years - long before I learned the term “Developer Experience.”

It started in 2009 at a small ad agency in Russia. I was a designer, but what I really did was build systems. Not because anyone asked me to - because broken processes bothered me more than broken layouts.

Then I moved into engineering. At a marketing research company, I replaced a monster Excel file (100K+ rows, one hour to save) with a proper SQL database. Monthly reports that took a full month went down to 2–4 days.

At Yandex (7 years), I built MediaPlanner - a tool that cut media plan creation from 1–2 days to under a minute. It eventually became part of Yandex.Direct. I also led Storybook migration, built deployment infrastructure, and started an internal analytics community from zero to 800 members.

At Microsoft, I created a dedicated DX role from scratch at Skype - the first of its kind in the team. I optimized mobile Fast Refresh from 60+ seconds to 2–5 seconds (a 30x improvement). When I finally heard the term “Developer Experience” in late 2023, everything clicked - I'd been doing it by intuition for 15 years.

Now I'm formalizing that intuition. My Bottom-Up DevEx methodology - published as a peer-reviewed paper - gives individual engineers a framework to identify friction, build the case for change, and drive improvements without waiting for top-down mandates.