skim-friendly resume

Maxim Chernyak

In Short

I come with over 10 years of web engineering experience, during which I've been pushing the limits of my knowledge and developing the eye and taste for doing the right thing. I've built a business from the ground up as a founder and CTO at Printio.ru, contributed to and started numerous open source projects, built and maintained various Ruby on Rails apps, architected applications of various sizes and ages, built infrastructures in Chef and subsequently Ansible as a devops engineer, discovered efficient ways of dealing with technical and organization pains of growing startups, and ensuring their smooth progress under budget constraints.

Expertise

Philosophy

I've been strongly inspired by the people behind some of my favorite books, like Robert Martin of Clean Code, Sandi Metz of POODR, and quite a few others. These books help us build flexible, decoupled software, yet there is a serious problem. Despite proper OOP, many well-meaning teams still end up facing friction stemming from premature architecture. This is something that I found hardly ever addressed in our community, and I am trying to ignite the convesation with this blog post titled "CMS trap".

Background

Before encountering the bliss of Ruby I have been programming in PHP, Python, .NET, C#, VB.net, C++, and even QBasic. Some of these endeavors go way back. My first program was a QBasic tool to help me solve math problems in school back in Russia. I was 9. My first C++ program was a phone number pronounciation utility, which combined snippets of my recorded voice to produce spoken compound numbers. I was 10. I'm a casual gym goer, hiker, and a PC gamer.

Education

For more than 2 years I studied at Polytechnic University (Brooklyn) pursuing a degree in Computer Science. I abandoned this pursuit a bit past half-way in. However, the courses in Algorithms, Data Structures, Discrete Math, and other fundamental computing-related subjects have taught me a lot.

Founder, CTO at Printio.ru June 2008 - Present

Printio.ru (registered in Russia) is an interactive online store for self-designed garments and stationery.

Consultant at Bitsonnet July 2005 - Present

Bitsonnet is a web development consulting company I founded with a colleague of mine (a front-end developer), where we built diverse client projects.

Employee/Freelancer