First and foremost, I would like to express the gratitude for my second year of university, which was the most exhausting period of studies that I’ve had so far but taught me a great deal of patience, focus, and perseverance. Also, I cannot but mention that never have I valued friendship as much as I do now. I was able to pass my exams with satisfying grades, and while I do not yet feel ready to dive into the next academic year, I am a lot more confident about its success.

Next, I would like to thank KDE for the most exciting learning experience I could wish for: the Plasma Mobile sprint in Berlin that I was lucky to attend. I have never met so many passionate developers in one place before, and learning from them, as well as contributing my humble bits of knowledge, was priceless.

And a special thanks to Linus and Jonah for showing me around the city 😃

Finally, I am incredibly thankful to Google for having me as a Software Engineering intern in Munich this summer 😃

Making Linux application support in Chrome OS easier to manage for schools, enterprises and individuals is by far the biggest contribution to the Linux ecosystem that I can possibly make. Most googlers I had a chance to meet are very positive, cheerful and helpful. My first feature has landed the Chromium codebase today, and I am very excited and motivated for the rest of my work here.

To make sure you don’t have to wait another half a year to hear from me, I’m sharing my Instagram; I seem to be more responsible at posting pics of cute stuff around me than at serious blogging 🙂

I wanted to keep this update short and easy to read. If, however, I managed to get you interested and craving for more info, feel free to reach out to me!.

And have a great summer! 😄

2018 was the first year for me that started with exams. Not that I haven’t spent holidays studying for exams before, though, so with some persistence and tangerine fuel 🍊 I passed them all good enough and had a week of TV series and open source contribution before the upcoming semester. With some help from Halium project maintainers and a steep learning curve, I was finally able to conquer graphics libraries on an x86 Android phone and start a Wayland compositor. At the same time, my efforts on the Russian-speaking KDE community became visible, as our friendly local group crossed a symbolic border of 1000 members!

The new courses at university were difficult at first, so I had to really focus on my studies. I had a nice weekend break at the C++ Russia conference, but otherwise had been immersed, and that helped me catch up and finish the freshman year proudly. 🏆

In July, August, and September I could finally participate in the world of free software again. I was mostly focused on Plasma Mobile, KDE’s mobile platform, and KDE Russia. I prepared and gave an introductory talk about GNU/Linux on mobile devices, then developed and launched the kde.ru website. I’m thankful to Chaos Constructions conference managers and local FOSS news platforms for the chance to promote KDE’s amazing work to wider audiences. 📱

VK Hackathon

As part of an amateur yet motivated team, I was working on a corporate assistant application for the State Hermitage Museum. Our aim was to provide a 3-in-1 cross-platform solution: a task management system, an internal messenger and a navigation system (Hermitage is huge). The deadline was tough, but we managed to deliver a working prototype.

Our application was not selected by case managers, but the atmosphere of passionate hacking is unforgettable. Besides, some of my work went upstream and will benefit many applications to come 🙂

ICPC NEERC 2018

My second time in this competitive programming contest as a Technical Committee assistant. It is an amazing experience, as well as a steep learning curve. Thanks to everyone who participated in this year’s programming competitions at ITMO University, both teams and fellow volunteers! 👨‍💻💪

Rust

An ordinary algorithm class assignment can become a challenging experiment if you give up on your habits and try solving it using a different programming language, like Rust. I’ve had a deep dive into the Rust ecosystem, implementing some algorithms, trying a game framework and building a research web browser (with small fixes along the way).

I’ll definitely continue learning the ways of oxidized metal in 2019! 📔

To the awesome new year!

Let 2019 be even better for us all! Thank you for reading, and all the best in 2019! 😃

On 25-26th of August I was lucky to be there and give an introductory talk about Plasma Mobile, Halium and other projects that aim for a complete GNU/Linux experience on smartphones and tablets.

That was my first talk at a big event, and I was very emotional and nervous. Nevertheless, the talk went just fine, people were interested in our work around Plasma Mobile, and we had a long discussion about the future of GNU/Linux on mobiles as we see it.

I plan to turn my talk into a big blog post (or a series, if appropriate) so that all the stuff I collected and learned could be useful for more people. Stay tuned!

I would like to thank event organizers for the amazing experience and a chance to talk about my passion to the smart geeky crowd of Chaos Constructions! 🙂

Also, a big shout-out to @JBBGameich, Bhushan Shah, and @NotKit for their help with putting my device into shape for the talk.

If you would like to join Plasma Mobile development, you can always find interesting tasks here and here.

For more news of the Russian KDE community, join us at vk.com/kde_ru or t.me/kde_ru.

I finally got a small break from the endless studies, so I decided to share my experience during C++ Russia 2018, an amazing C++ developer conference that I was lucky to attend as a volunteer.

The conference is a fun 3-day-long event hosted by the C++ Russia User Group, and an opportunity to listen to deep knowledge and practical wisdom of speakers from all over the world. This year’s keynote speaker was Jon Kalb, a C++ developer with 25-years of experience.

I managed to attend a number of talks, including:

• Interactive C++ Compilation (REPL): The Lean Way by Viktor Kirilov
• C++ No-Launch Code Debugging by Anastasia Kazakova
• Building in Docker with Conan by Evgeny Lukyanets
• Concept Based Testing by Dietmar Kühl
• CMake Pitfalls and Where to Find Them by Dmitry Kozhevnikov
• WebAssembly Transition: Is It Worth It? by Pavel Bulatov

I have also met many interesting people, some developers I previously messaged with, and made new friends 🙂

I would like to thank Sergey Platonov, the event manager, for this awesome experience.