My story
04 //I was born in Cherkasy, Ukraine. When I was three, my family moved to New York for a year, then back to Ukraine — to Lviv, where I went to Lyceum №28. That's where the obsession started: robotics kits, taking things apart, wanting to know how machines think.
After 4th grade we moved to London. That's where I wrote my first real code — Python at first, then Unity, where I disappeared for 100+ hours. Game development was my first taste of building something from nothing: physics, logic, art, sound — all of it yours.
At the end of my first Sek year we moved again — this time to Switzerland. New country, new language, new school. I drifted into web design for a while, but came back to serious programming quickly, because nothing else felt the same.
Then things accelerated. I entered a game jam and shipped a complete game with cutscenes. I joined my first hackathon and placed 56th out of 903. At the next one — an international hackathon — my team built UniMatch and finished 25th out of 930. Somewhere in between, I built a custom OS on the Linux kernel, just to understand what sits underneath everything.
Next I taught myself Swift and SwiftUI and started shipping to the App Store. My first apps got 100+ downloads and earned my first $8 of subscription revenue. Eight dollars sounds small, but it changed how I think: strangers paid for something I made alone. Since then I've built 8 iOS apps — including Flowline, an AI day planner, and BellyCue, a health app with an on-device statistics engine — published under my own studio brand, Velnor.
The biggest jump came when I joined Suisse Voice, a Swiss AI startup, for three months. My first time inside a real company: a production codebase, code reviews, deadlines, and customers who notice when something breaks. I worked on AI voice technology for businesses — telephony integrations, Docker deployments, features that had to ship. Three months there taught me more about real software engineering than a year of solo projects.
Today I live in Zollikon and study at WISS in Zürich, going deep on backend engineering — Python, FastAPI, PostgreSQL, and the infrastructure that holds products together. The goal hasn't changed since the robotics kits in Lviv: build things people actually use. I'm just getting better tools.