About Me

Hey, I’m Andrew Vasilyev, though online I usually go by “retran”. I’m a developer, mentor, and curious human currently living in Amsterdam.

My programming journey started early — when I was five, I typed my first program from a children’s book called “Logibul au pays de l’informatique”. That single moment sparked a lifelong passion for figuring out how things work and how to make them better.

In school, I dove headfirst into programming contests, loving the thrill of solving puzzles. Later, my path drifted through game dev experiments, enterprise platforms, and service architectures before I finally found my calling in developer tools and applied AI.

At Ozon.ru, I led a small team that built a loyalty system for millions of users — and somehow, it worked flawlessly from day one. At Acumatica, I built an API framework and helped streamline mobile client development. Later at 1C Company, I dove deep into the world of virtual machines and debuggers, and even helped plug their dev tools into VS Code and Eclipse.

In 2018, I joined JetBrains, where I spent several years building tools for .NET developers. I had the privilege of mentoring 8 interns (earning the unofficial title of “head of interns” on the .NET team), running internal workshops, and co-building features like inlay hints, predictive debugging, and static analyzers for Entity Framework — many of which are still around in ReSharper and Rider. Eventually, I led the ReSharper AI team, where we integrated LLMs and RAG into everyday developer workflows. Here’s a demo if you’re curious.

After a short but interesting two-month sprint at Uber, where I built internal tooling for the Kotlin ecosystem and supported contributors in the Kotlin world—including Google Summer of Code participants—I joined Nebius in 2025, where I now work on AI infrastructure.

Teaching and mentoring have always been close to my heart. I’ve taught “IDE Development” at the Higher School of Economics and Constructor University, and earlier in my career, I taught programming and machine learning at the Moscow Aviation Institute. From 2021 to 2022, I mentored students in algorithms at Practicum by Yandex.

When I’m not writing code, I like taking apart gadgets, experimenting with compilers, or building little tools just for the fun of it. My GitHub is a mix of serious projects and playgrounds.

Courses I’ve Taught

  1. “IDE Development”

    2023, Bremen, Constructor University

  2. “IDE Development”

    2021, Moscow, Higher School of Economics, CS Faculty

    Awards:

    • “Best Course for Career Development”
    • “Best Course for Broadening Horizons and Diversity of Knowledge and Skills”
    • “Best Course for New Knowledge and Skills”

    Recordings: YouTube Playlist

  3. “High-Level Programming Languages”

    2011–2014, Moscow, Moscow Aviation Institute

  4. “Pattern Recognition and Machine Learning”

    2011–2014, Moscow, Moscow Aviation Institute

Media Mentions

  1. Interview about my mentoring experience at Yandex Practicum
  2. JetBrains Hackathon – where our “Hello, Space!” project won first place
  3. How to get started with prompt engineering – InfoWorld article

Connect with Me