Summary
Adam Arutyunov was founded on June 20, in 2003 in the city of Rostov-on-Don.
I started programming at the age of six when my father taught me the basics of ActionScript and handed me a thick textbook on Flash development.
I couldn’t instantly grasp all the nuances of the language. I didn't know why you should put parentheses in this case and curly brackets in that one. I did not know how to create multiple identical objects of the same class and was not aware of the concepts of object-oriented programming. But the key thing was that I knew how to use the language and make the program work fairly well.
My first game was called Checkers2009. It had a board and checkers, and they were red and blue — have no idea why. On the sides of the board there were two stickmen of the same two colors, representing the players. You could move the checkers and stickmen — well, I mean, drag and drop them around the field as you wish. Just like in actual checkers!
In Flash, graphics could be created on the canvas directly rather than being programmed, — just like in Adobe Illustrator. Animations were made with a simple built-in frame system, and code could be used to make the program interactive.
Flash wasn't created to teach programming, but it was great for that. A couple of sources of my childhood programs have lived up to this day.
2.
When I was ten years old, my older brother enrolled in courses on Pascal, and I used to sneak peek at his code trying to make some of my own. I wrote a lot of drafts, created relatively useless programs, and took part in school computer science olympiads. At about the same time I learned the basics of HTML and CSS (those two came in handy).
In 2018, when I was in eighth grade, Yandex Lyceum opened in my home town, a two-year course for school students on Python and backend basics. By that moment, I wanted to learn something for the first time in my life, not only in snippets, but consistently and methodically. I was selected and enrolled into the course, and two years later I graduated with three projects of my own (they are now in the archive).
3.
In 2019, I enrolled in a two-week hackathon for students at a local technical university. The hackathon was launched by Rostselmash, the largest combine-harvester factory in Russia.
Our team of school students won the hackathon, and we were awarded a grant and got the offer to work at the factory to run the migration of the accounting system for harvesting machines assembly into the web. Prior to that, the entire assembly plan was printed out on a paper board and painted over with a marker. After six months, they ditched the paperboard and switched to our system, and then the project was handed over to the internal department.
Programming not in an office, but in an assembly shop, inhaling paint fumes and risking falling right inside the conveyor line was an invaluable experience.
4.
In 2021 I released my first iconic
website, which is now archived.
By the end of school, I was involved in several commercial projects, developing my own products, participating in hackathons and school competitions, freelancing, and doing a little bit of olympiad programming and neural networks. I never made it to college, but on the day of my school graduation I was offered an internship at the Art. Lebedev Studio.
I had worked at the studio for two and a half years. I ran the development of Potokus and Fokus, programmed neural network for brand creation Nikolay Ironov.
I worked at Dodo Brands and automated layout design for their restaurants all over the world.
Worked at Huly, rebuilt the landing page on a different stack and optimized site loading.
To be continued.
Outside of work
- finished music school, the piano class;
- did aikido for five years;
- since 2019, travel to wherever my feet take me;
- digital nomad since 2022;
- visited every metro station in Moscow, Kazan, Yekaterinburg and Almaty;
- visited 50 Dodo Pizza restaurants in 33 cities in 8 countries;
- rapped and sold the right to touch my bald head in elementary school;
- (okay, that's already oversharing).