Ivan Anishchuk
Machine Learning / Zero-Knowledge Cryptography Researcher
This page should explain in a little more detail my professional experience and skills. But it's a long story and it needs to be rewritten at this point in my career, I will take some time on it, but to any potential headhunsters or investors or any grifters whatsoever: I am not actively looking, all set for everything, impossible to poach. I do backends and crypto and some other tech stuff and lead nerds for fun and for living.
Most recently I switched to ML/Crypto stuff following the market trends and am currently researching decentralized AI on Web3 with my good friends at Inference Labs but I continue being hand-on with Python (FastAPI in particular, haven't touched Django for a while) and Rust. Funny, but a BitTensor node is essentially a FastAPI server underneath, I think backend skills are becoming even more relevant in the coming age of Web3.
Some of my old software projects were actually kinda cool starting with subject matter (improving civil aviation with AI, giving people free music, helping them to hear again - to name a few) but my role and beauty of my own work is pretty much irrelevant to that, that's how I'd talk about what I do at a pub. Setting up dev processes and tools, scaffolding new projects, making sure teamwork happens naturally and comfortably, early high-level research and architectural planning, implementing the bulk of the first minimal prototype in a way that allows fleshing details out gradually without early major rewrites, being the one who motivates everyone to keep improving code quality either by example or with some gentle guidance, predicting pitfalls and being ready for urgent optimization and refactoring when everything goes as expected, spending hours in technical discussions that seemingly lead to almost nothing yet somehow create shared culture, those parts I like the most about what I do. They are hard to describe, to showcase, or even translate to a new environment sometimes, meanwhile everybody can code given good requirements. Asking the right questions to clarify the requirements in areas not even thought of before, that's a skill I value more than coding. But I can code, of course, probably a bit better than most, my work is almost always mostly coding and I like it that way. Managers are extremely valuable exactly because people like me don't like doing organizational things. Working with people one on one is something I not only tolerate but sometimes excel at, give me a few hourly sessions and I can teach anyone a few helpful tricks and learn a lot myself. I also can write okay technical English but don't have enough discipline to be responsible for documentation maintenance.
Before the web era (and it started a long time ago for me, more than a decade) I made some desktop office software, worked sysadmin and tech support jobs, completed a few random projects like scripts and data scrapers. I can still set up a web server with my eyes closed, both bare metal and modern orchestrated cloud containers. Valuable experience, not going back to that, but I can collaborate with DevOps specialists and help straighten ops out from the dev perspective and sometimes even enjoy it.
And before that I was thinking about an academic career and studied serious math and cryptography but never bothered to graduate. It was fun actually. It was where I was first introduced to Python (2.4 was the current stable version at the time.)
And even before all that I started programming for fun and using desktop Linux. First "hello world" was over two decades ago (must've been around 2003 but I don't remember much details.)