Denys Inhul

Ukraine

playing a lot of games and programming since ~10yold. (just jQuery and no ai, the good old days lol). went to Dnipro Lyceum of Information Technology closely associated with one of National Universities. that place raised the bar significantly. profs had doctorals and taught in uni too, kids were doing math olympiads and shit. grade 9 friend was doing ML without waiting for school to teach him. it was dope

Toronto

moved to Canada in 2018. didn’t enojy public school much so spent 3 years mostly working on my own projects. arbitrage bots, drone control software in C, ml frameorks from scratch, gpu computing, galaxy sims. webdev too, of course, man’s gotta pay the bills.

University of Waterloo

didn’t get into CS somehow, got into math. ehh, grinded for a year, got perfect grades, transferred into cs and pretty much fucked off away from waterloo soon after.

NYC, Spatial

two internships at startup Spatial, first proper job, backend, frontend, product, working with payments, auth, database scaling, production with 100s of thosounds MAU that I got to touch directly, caused 1 proper outage. learned a lot under backend tech lead with 20 YoE.

Singapore

exchange at National University of Singapore. first time outside of country by myself. I had grades, money, job security and was on the other side of the world to do whatever. took 6 hard classes, didn’t show up to exam for one of them cause I was busy traveling with the boyssss. climbed volcanoes, learned about cultures, almost died twice. lots of photography and crazy stories.

Vietnam

decided to try out digital nomad lifestyle. went to Da Nang in Vietnam for 3 months. tried to work on my own thing. depressing as hell, turns out penthouses, beaches and riches are not that meaningful after week 1. got into bjj and running 10k a day, learned a lot about myself, life, value of routines, how to dig myself in and out of mental holes. nice place, but never again.

NYC, Magi

after 1 year of not working was hungry to do something interesting. joined an eng team of a billionaire for basically no money cause I just wanted to learn. first time being directly responsible for success of a product line. ended up owning backend, infra, and large parts of a custom ab experiment stack across products with 10s of thousands of WAU (we developed the experiment infra, stats, data eng and data sci in house). learned a lot about b2c, ads, eng, everything ab testing, and how to craft a resignation letter.

Singapore

yeah, NUS, again. focused on meeting people, researchers, dinners with founders who exited in US and moved to Singapore, learning about south-east asia economics and startups. never swam in ocean, but did party in seoul from 8pm to 8am for 2 days straight, apparently that is normal there

NYC, Endex

oh god, a lot happened in a year. this fully consumed all of me, feels like a blink of an eye and half a decade at the same time. joined as an eng pre-pmf, we started prototyping ai for excel and launched in august, then I stepped into leading engineering in october. spent most of my time supporting prod as we scaled by 100x, hiring and rebuilding eng team.

solo again