Programmer's Notes

My wife and I

The essense

I’m 24. I’m a successful programmer, specializing in web-development, but with great interest to the robotics and AI.

Childhood

The story goes back to 16 of January, 1987 when I was born. My father was a military sailor, specialising in electronics. My mother was a teacher at school. In 1990 I’ve got a sister, mother took a long leave and father gave up military, continued working as an engineer and started his business in 1992. In 2001 I’ve got a brother, he’s 10 now, I tried to teach him programming but had no luck – it is not interesting to him at all
Unlike him, I was always interested in different technical things and liked different crafts. I saw computer when I was 6, father bought it for the work. He had essential number of accounting in his business, but had to do everything himself, so computer with accounting software was very helpful. So, since I saw the computer, was dreaming of creating programs. Nobody could teach me this, so shortly I gave up the idea and only played games. In a year father got an office and computer was moved there. They were very expensive then (can you imagine $100 for the SIMPLEST keyboard?!), so they used it just for work. There I got acquainted with internet in 1998 (approximately), it was very simple then – just HTML pages, the most advanced things were search engines. I remember when I learned how to search there, I was spending lots of time there searching for different space-related things.

Becoming a programmer

Time passed, I was studying in a good school, that specialized in English (that’s how I learned it), mainly I was interested in Math, Physics and was learning English because I felt I’ll need it in the future When I was 14, father bought me a computer as a new year present. I was so exited with it! Sure, I spent lots of time playing games (Diablo II was the favourite one), but in a year I gave it up. The reason was that I read a book “The Turing Option” by Harry Harrison and started dreaming of creating AI. Sure, I had to learn programming. So I searched the internet, found some tutorials (it was so little of good ones 7 years ago), started with Pascal, then moved to Delphi. I spent 2 years till I finished school studying Delphi and thought that web-development is dull But then I’ve got interested in earning money and I was advised to learn either PHP or C#.Net. I chose PHP because it seemed more simple.

Professional growth

In a year I’ve got my first client (VERY simple dating site), and got $100 for it. That was so cool to get such money in a country where average salary at that time was $120!!! I created lots of them since then, becoming more and more skillful. Then I was freelancing, my main customers were US entrepreneurs and businesses. Then after 2008 summer when there crisis busted out, I had to find new clients because my old ones were either bankrupt or not going to continue any development nearest time. New clients were found in UK and I was dealing with them till June 2009 when I’ve got an interesting contract from one of my clients. He offered me the full-time remote job and I agreed because at that time I could hardly find new clients and was going to get married, so this was a really good variant for me.
After I worked a year with them, I’ve graduated from university, the project ended and I had to find other sources of income. And I started my own web-development business.

Running a business

The first problem I’ve got were employees Sure, I had some savings, I had some prospective clients, but I need people that could do these projects with me. I’ve invited my groupmate who graduated with me a few months ago and he became my first employee. Then I’ve also invited talented students from the university. During the last year I was teaching web-development and the best ones joined me in my company. Some of them still study, but work full time, others – graduated and work full time with me as well.

Now, with employees I could find nice projects I wanted to specialize in the CRM and high-load website development. CRMs were interesting because they involve business process automation and optimization. High load is always interesting because it allows to creating wonderful projects for big audience. First projects were CRM-related:

• Insighlty-like system which required more integration with google docs, more features specific to our client’s business needs and more. Unfortunately, when the project was 95% finished and 25% paid, the client changed his mind because they’ve got some problems with their business and they gave up this project. So we ended up with working code, but without money
• Another project which we were handling at the same time was CRM for telecommunication industry on Netherlands. It automates everything – clients, prospects, inventory, orders from distributors, contracts, payments, schedule and much more. This project is still being developed now (Mar 2011), but it is already in testing state and will go to production soon. Technologies there were really interesting – full-featured desktop-like interface based on ExtJS, hardware integration, touch screen-targeted modules, API integration etc. We’ve worked out a number of nice solutions which became our know-how and which we’re applying to other projects as well.

These two projects allowed me to start my business and push it forward. Yes, I had to work from 8 to 8, yes I had to read tons of documentation, best practices and such, I had to cut down my expenses to minimum, but now I have a successful steadily growing business.

Personal life

My Chevrolet Lacetti 1.6

I have a nice wife, we married in August 2010. She’s a great person – beautiful, very smart, self-organized and committed. Although she specializes in English and economics, she is very broad-minded and we can always find something to discuss. I really enjoy being together with her

We have a car, which I’m very proud of – Chevrolet Lacetti (2008). I took a loan to get it, but I really like driving and going somewhere, so I don’t regret I have it. Before that I had Lada 2106 (1995) which was really cool fro the first car

I really like nature and photography. That’s why I go hiking when I have time for this. Usually it is Crimea cause my grandfather lives there and I have place where to stay You can take a look at my album I took in the Crimea last year on my facebook page.

My future plans are:

• Learn English better to communicate with ease
• Turn this blog into something really useful and maybe monetize it then
• Grow my business and expand it to other country by registering a company in US
• Create own CRM that will allows us providing better solutions faster and cheaper. At the same time, we’re going to offer it as a SaaS as well
• Move to some other country. I’m considering only English-speaking countries since I know only English, US is a quite probable choice

My contacts

• Email: konstantin.mirin(at)gmail.com
• ICQ: 230373542
• Skype: jedideveloper
• Find me on facebook: http://www.facebook.com/profile.php
• Follow me on twitter: http://twitter.com/KonstantinMirin

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