About me

Hey there,

My name is Artem Gordinskiy.

It’s been a while since I had an actual website instead of relying solely on Twitter and Instagram for self-expression. Thanks to The Pandemic, I had some free time to buy this ridiculous domain name and whip something up using Hugo and GitHub Pages. Feels good having my own little corner “on the interwebs” again.

Not sure how best to characterise myself, but I guess I’m just an average nerd from Ukraine. I love music, especially classic rock and metal, the heavy kind.

I’ve been tinkering with computers ever since I got my hands on one. That was around the age of 12, when my cousin went away to a university and my aunt let me come over and use his old Windows 2000 machine during weekends and nights. That thing absolutely captivated me! All those days and nights playing Diablo or simply poking around in the OS and exploring every corner of it (even without an internet connection).

In 2007, when I was 14 years old, my parents were finally able to afford a down payment and take out a two-year loan to buy myself and my brother our own PC. And that’s not all! The computer came with a dial-up modem which means I was finally able to join the cool kids and “get online”! Even though the computer was a pretty basic one and the rural phone line was fairly crappy, that was one of the happiest moments of my life!

For the first year, I was mostly just playing games and goofing around on the internet (yes, I did some homework on it too, mom!). Then, in 2010, my brother — Yevhen — has asked me to make a website for one of his early entrepreneurial experiments. That sounded interesting, so I figured out how to register a domain name, set up hosting and use a free HTML template I found online. That got me tinkering with HTML and CSS.

After that, I kept making more websites for fun and profit. Mostly in WordPress, after discovering how easy it was to customise and use any of the thousands of free themes available online. None of those websites are around anymore, except for a couple of examples like this and this from my “web agency”’s portfolio, miraculously saved by Archive.org. Along the way, I picked up bits of PHP and JavaScript, with some help from Codecademy and a bunch of random tutorials, books and videos.

Starting in 2013, I (mostly) stopped free-lancing and got my first full-time job as a full-stack developer. I learned a ton in the 3 years at my first job in Cybertone, building all kinds of complex websites, iOS & Android app back-ends and so on.

In 2016, I was lucky enough to get offered a job at a cool Amsterdam start-up called Hubs (previously — “3D Hubs”). In the 4.5 years at Hubs, I had a lot of fun tackling all kinds of challenges maintaining and optimising complex applications as well as building new, distributed systems. The best part, however, was being able to work with some of the most passionate, smartest people I ever met and making a bunch of friends in the process.

At the beginning of 2021 I decided to explore the world of FinTech and joined Mollie. I’ve also written about my job search process in this blog post.

To be continued!