Become a sponsor to Andrey Subbotin

Hey! I'm Andrey.

I've been into all things software development professionally since 1998, when I landed a web master job and occupied myself with all things Perl. Before that there was a Soviet UKNC-0511 running Basic, and an Electronika MS 1502 I could never connect to our old black-and-white TV set, so I wrote little music-generating programs without being able to see a single character of the code. My first PC turned up in February that year, a 60Mhz Pentium with 4MB of RAM. My uncle hadn't included a monitor. For a while the Prt Scrn key was my good friend.

Since then: a billing system on Linux, iptables and PostgreSQL, a full-blown DNS server in C++ from scratch, a VFS driver for Windows, a .Net/COM bridge at Acronis wired together with C# and a monstrous pile of XSLT, the Yandex.Maps and Yandex.Metrica iOS teams, and a video messenger we took to the Startup Battlefield at TechCrunch Disrupt. That one had Jingle, VP8, ICE, MongoDB and Redis under the hood and no clue whatsoever about user acquisition. It didn't raise a cent, I burnt out, and I moved back to Moscow.

These days I live in Wollongong, write Clojure for a living, run FreeBSD at home because Linux has grown too complicated over the years, and spend most of my spare hours in Emacs and Common Lisp.

My GitHub isn't a monument to any of that. It's a handful of small utilities, most of them written because something had annoyed me one time too many, and plenty haven't been touched since whichever career phase produced them. A fair few are archived outright: when I stop maintaining something I'd rather say so than leave it sitting there looking alive. None of it is worth bragging about. Small dull tools that do one job are most of what I want from other people's repositories too, so I'm not going to pretend mine are more than that.

So there's no roadmap on this page and I'm not going to invent one. What you'd be sponsoring is me, not a project.

Twenty-eight years in, the thing I actually have is judgement. Name a technology and I probably know a thing or two about it, how to use it effectively and, what's arguably more important, when not to use it. That doesn't package up neatly. Mostly it shows up as absence: the code I talk someone out of writing, the dependency that never gets added, the clever idea that quietly dies in a thread. Occasionally it shows up as a small tool that does one job and then stops. I give nearly all of it away without thinking about it, which is fine, and which also makes it invisible.

Sponsorship won't change my circumstances. I've got work I enjoy and a family I'd rather be outdoors with. What it does is tell me some of this landed, that somebody pulled down a fifteen-year-old utility of mine, or read something I wrote, and got their afternoon back.

If that's been you at some point, well, that's what this page is for.