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.

I got into programming early — when I was five, I typed my first program from a children’s book called “Logibul au pays de l’informatique”. That one moment sparked a lifelong interest in figuring out how things work and how to make them better.

In school, I competed in programming contests and loved the puzzle-solving side of code. Later, I drifted through game dev experiments, enterprise platforms, and service architectures before finding my place in developer tools and applied AI.

At Ozon.ru, I led a small team that built a loyalty system for millions of users — which somehow worked on day one. At Acumatica, I built an API framework and helped streamline mobile clients development. Later at 1C Company, I worked on a virtual machine and debugger, and 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 mentored 8 interns (earning the unofficial title “head of interns” in the .NET team), ran internal workshops, and co-built features like inlay hints, predictive debugging, and static analyzers for Entity Framework — many of which stuck 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.

Since 2025, I’ve been at Uber, building internal tooling for the Kotlin ecosystem. I also support contributors in the Kotlin ecosystem — including Google Summer of Code participants.

Teaching and mentoring have always been close to my heart. I’ve taught “IDE Development” at Higher School of Economics and Constructor University, and earlier taught programming and machine learning at 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