Roman's TechnoSophy
About
Who’s Roman R?
I’ve spent decades developing interesting software in multiple countries and cultures. Throughout my journey, I’ve gained wisdom and knowledge that I’d like to share on this blog.
It all started a long, long time ago—1992, to be exact—when I was a kid in 2nd grade. The first time I glimpsed another class working with computers through a slightly opened door, I knew that’s what I’d be doing for the rest of my life. It was a magical and insightful moment.
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School was challenging because everyone was trying to become an accountant, lawyer, or famous soccer player. It wasn’t a friendly environment by today’s standards, and nobody cared about computers. My parents bought me my first PC around 1996—a Pentium 133 with 16MB of RAM and a 200MB HDD. That became my escape from the real world; I could spend days playing games or trying to fix a broken DOS/Win95 system or some sound drivers. In school, we were learning QBasic, and I also took Borland Pascal and later Delphi courses. Eventually, I discovered modems, BBS, and the internet. That was it—the entire world was on my desk, and I still remember the sound difference between 56k and 36k dial-up.
After earning my master’s degree, I landed my first real development job at SoftElegance, where I learned a lot. I’m grateful to my teammates and Andriy Stolbov for letting me learn and work on many great projects. During my university years, I also started practicing yoga, which taught me a lot about different mental states and the human body.
I also found really good friends; we learned a lot from each other and had some crazy stories to share. We still keep in touch, but now they’re all in different countries, so I miss them in real life.
After gaining some experience, I founded iTech.ua and became the CTO. I hoped to focus on cool tech projects, but I was forced to drive around, talk to clients, and negotiate contracts, which wasn’t my thing (at least, it wasn’t then). We closed the company during the 2008 crisis, which was tough on the local market.
I sought stability and certainty in life and a way to have fun coding again. Upwork (a freelance platform) was the perfect solution. I met some great people there, especially JC Jenning; we worked together on multiple Broadway projects. Since I was working remotely (long before it became a trend), I started to travel a lot and spent time on different islands, scuba diving and coding. It was the best time of my life (except for the slow internet).
I met my wife (now ex-wife) during a trip to the USA. I was blown away by her ability to code and build robots. We spent some time together, but time has no mercy—people change, and their life goals and priorities shift, so in the end, we went our separate ways.
And now, two decades later, I am working in fintech, enjoying challenging tasks, writing code, and building projects.
It’s still fun, I still love it, and I’m here to share my journey with the world.