About Me
Hey, I’m Andrew
Online, I usually go by “retran”. I’m a developer, a mentor, and a curious human living in Amsterdam, but my story begins with a book.
When I was five, I found a children’s book from France called Logibul au pays de l’informatique. Sitting with my father, I typed my first lines of code from its pages. I couldn’t have known it then, but that single moment sparked a lifelong fascination with the hidden machinery of the digital world—a desire not just to use things, but to understand how they work and how to make them better.
This curiosity first led me to the thrill of programming contests in school, where every problem was a puzzle waiting to be unlocked. After university, my path drifted through the complex landscapes of enterprise software. At Ozon.ru, I led a small team that built a loyalty system for millions of users, holding our breath on launch day as it worked without a hitch. At Acumatica, I built frameworks that helped generate APIs and mobile clients, getting my first taste of creating tools that empowered other developers. Later, at 1C Company, I dove deeper than ever before, into the very heart of a development platform—implementing a virtual machine, building debuggers, and helping connect their proprietary tools to the outside world through VS Code and Eclipse. I was no longer just building on top of platforms; I was building the platforms themselves.
In 2018, I found my calling when I joined JetBrains. It was here that my love for puzzles and my experience in systems programming finally merged. For several years, I helped build the tools I had always wanted to use, contributing to features like inlay hints, predictive debugging, and static analyzers for Entity Framework—many of which are still quietly helping thousands of .NET developers in ReSharper and Rider today. I also had the privilege of mentoring eight interns, a role that became an unexpected passion and earned me the unofficial title of “head of interns” on the .NET team. Eventually, I was asked to lead the ReSharper AI team, where we worked to weave the power of LLMs and RAG directly into the fabric of the coding experience. If you’re curious, here’s a demo of our work.
After JetBrains, I took a short but intense sprint at Uber, diving headfirst into the massive scale of their Kotlin ecosystem. There, I built internal tooling and supported open-source contributors, including participants in the Google Summer of Code.
Woven throughout my professional journey is a deep love for teaching. It’s a thread that has run from my earliest days as a teaching assistant for programming and machine learning at the Moscow Aviation Institute, to mentoring students in algorithms at Practicum by Yandex, to developing and teaching my own “IDE Development” course at the Higher School of Economics and later at Constructor University in Germany.
When I’m not at a keyboard for work, I’m often at one for play—taking apart gadgets, experimenting with compilers, or building little tools just for the fun of it. My GitHub is a reflection of this: a mix of serious projects and digital playgrounds.
Courses I’ve Taught
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“IDE Development”
2023, Bremen, Constructor University -
“IDE Development”
2021, Moscow, Higher School of Economics
Awards: “Best Course for Career Development,” “Best Course for Broadening Horizons,” “Best Course for New Knowledge.”
Recordings: YouTube Playlist -
“High-Level Programming Languages”
2011–2014, Moscow, Moscow Aviation Institute -
“Pattern Recognition and Machine Learning”
2011–2014, Moscow, Moscow Aviation Institute