About

After being born in Latvia in mid-90s to a Russian expat family, I proceeded to move through time at an alarming speed, eventually ending up in the UK in 2010 for studies.

In 2015, I graduated from University of Cambridge with a BA (Hons) in Computer Science. I then worked for two years for Man AHL, a quantitative investment manager, first in a pure software role and then as a half-programmer-and-a-bit-of-a-researcher, gaining experience in a wide variety of disciplines – from understanding, developing, deploying, maintaining and helping operators with running large production-quality codebases in Python and Java to working with equities, interest rate derivatives and other fun financial instruments.

I currently work on Splitgraph, a tool that can be described as “Docker for data” and that allows data scientists and data engineers to create, share and extend datasets in a reproducible and convenient way.

My other interests in computer science/software engineering include machine learning (especially its applications to real-world problems like bioinformatics: my final-year dissertation was about using the Correlated Topic Model to predict what genetic pathways a drug affects from its gene expression data), computer graphics (I’ve been working off-and-on on my path/ray-tracer, tRayce, for a while), programming languages (especially functional with a couple of random things written in Haskell/Scala) and compilers.

Outside of that, I’ve also dabbled in music (having played guitar to an audience once and to myself/my girlfriends countless times – apparently I even recorded this at some point), writing (I recently found on an old Russian forum my San Andreas and Morrowind fanfiction that I wrote back in 2005 – it’s still holding up but I would never want my name associated with it. It’s better if you browse the pre-vetted stuff on this blog under this tag) and videogames (making, playing and breaking them).

This blog was initially ported from my WordPress blog which is no longer updated.

This blog has now been ported to Kimonote, a minimalistic blogging/note-organizing platform that I wrote.