About
When I was five, I found a French children’s book called Logibul au pays de l’informatique. Sitting next to my father, I typed my first lines of code from its pages. I had no idea what the words on the screen meant, and I’ve been trying to understand them ever since.
The Short Version
I build developer tools, teach and tinker with side projects.
Right now I’m a Principal Developer at Mendix, working on Studio Pro and Maia. Mendix is a low-code platform that lets developers and business engineers build applications visually. Maia is the AI assistant built into Studio Pro: it generates code, recognizes what the developer intends and gives developers tools that know the platform. Before Mendix, I spent seven years at JetBrains on ReSharper and Rider, then led the ReSharper AI team, which built one of the first agentic assistants inside an integrated development environment (IDE). I’ve also shipped code at Uber, 1C Company, Acumatica and Ozon.ru.
I live in Amsterdam. Online, I go by “retran”.
How I Got Here
Programming contests at school turned my curiosity into regular practice, and university taught me to build software as a craft.
At Ozon.ru, I led a small team that built a loyalty system serving millions of users. At Acumatica, I wrote frameworks that generated REST APIs and mobile clients, my first time building tools for other developers and not for end users. At 1C Company, I went deeper and built a virtual machine, debuggers, and VS Code and Eclipse integrations for a proprietary platform. That was where I moved from building applications on a platform to building the platform itself.
In 2018, I joined JetBrains. I shipped inlay hints, predictive debugging and Entity Framework analyzers for ReSharper and Rider, and mentored eight interns on the .NET team. In 2023, I moved into a team lead role and built the ReSharper AI team from scratch. Its assistant was one of the first agentic assistants inside an IDE: we added code completion powered by large language models (LLMs) and context retrieval based on retrieval-augmented generation (RAG). Watch a demo of ReSharper AI Assistant.
After JetBrains, I spent a few months at Uber on the Kotlin Developer Platform. I worked on static analysis that fixes code style automatically, an LLM-driven continuous integration pipeline that converts Java to Kotlin, and mentoring Google Summer of Code contributors in the Kotlin ecosystem.
Now at Mendix, I work on Studio Pro’s AI layer: how Maia understands what a developer intends, generates correct code and connects to external tools through the Model Context Protocol (MCP).
Teaching
I’ve kept teaching alongside engineering for my whole career. It started at the Moscow Aviation Institute, where I was a teaching assistant for programming and machine learning courses. Later, I mentored students in algorithms at Practicum by Yandex, and then I designed and taught my own course.
Courses
- “IDE Development”, 2023, Constructor University, Bremen
- “IDE Development”, 2021, Higher School of Economics, Moscow Awards: “Best Course for Career Development”, “Best Course for Broadening Horizons” and “Best Course for New Knowledge” Recordings on YouTube
- “High-Level Programming Languages”, 2011-2014, Moscow Aviation Institute
- “Pattern Recognition and Machine Learning”, 2011-2014, Moscow Aviation Institute
Side Projects
I build compilers, game tools and Neovim plugins for fun. The projects page shows the highlights, and GitHub has everything.
Media Mentions
- How to get started with prompt engineering (InfoWorld)
- My mentoring experience at Yandex Practicum (Russian)
- JetBrains Hackathon: “Hello, Space!” won first place (Russian)