I spent thirteen years keeping machines running. Now I write the software for them.

I started in a production plant in Zaporizhzhya, Ukraine — machinery, factory cranes, auxiliary plant. It is a good place to learn what actually breaks, and why, and how differently a machine behaves at four in the morning than it does in a specification.

Then I went to sea. Radars, satellite communications, radio and shipboard networks first, and then seven years with Disney Cruise Line as an automation engineer — ship automation systems, diesel generators, bridge equipment, CCTV, satellite comms. Nine years on ships altogether.

What that teaches you is not really electronics. It's that there is nowhere to send a broken board. There's no vendor to escalate to and no next sprint. It is the middle of the night, the ship is at sea, and it has to work before morning — with the parts and the people that happen to be aboard. That's a different relationship with reliability than most software people ever have a reason to develop.

Around 2021 I decided nine years at sea was enough, and taught myself to build the systems I'd spent a decade maintaining. C++ first, then iOS. I've worked on production iOS since — test automation at scale, commerce, music, health and keyboard-extension products — for a US product studio. Those clients are covered by contract, so I don't name them; the work was real and the scale was large, and that's as much as I'll claim.

Now I work for myself. I build and run ProWord, live in both app stores, built alone across iOS, Android, web and backend. I built VesselRef, an on-premise AI that answers questions from scanned technical manuals and drawings without anything leaving the customer's network. And I build software for other people's businesses — usually businesses with equipment behind them, because that's where being both kinds of engineer is worth something.

The through-line is straightforward: I've been the person who gets the call when it stops working. It changes what you build.