Story
Membrane2021 - 2026
Employee #2 at Membrane (an AI-powered iPaaS). Shaped the product with the founder
from prototype to the first 200 customers, then built and led Solutions & CX motion:
technical pre-sales, the POC programme, custom solutions delivery, support.
- $2M+ ARR generated through technical pre-sales
- >50% of free POCs converted to paid
- 90% of 500+ monthly tickets handled by AI agent I designed
The part I'm proudest of: 500+ technical tickets a month were arriving from customer
developers, written in their terms rather than ours, and hiring didn't scale. So I
redesigned our support SOPs and turned them into agent tools and prompts that walk
the exact journey a CX person walks - then switched the whole front line over within
a month.
Sentrium2020 - 2021
Engineering manager for a VoIP platform. Led 25 engineers, owned delivery and
technical direction.
Footty2018 - 2020
Co-founder and CEO. Computer vision that predicted your shoe size from a photo,
aimed at e-commerce returns. Pilot with one of Eastern Europe's largest
retailers, €100K from the Rockstart accelerator in Amsterdam. Never found
product-market fit — the most educational two years I've had.
Earlier2012 - 2020
Product engineer at ELEKS, taking an ML model marketplace from concept to
shipped v1; senior engineer at Aura; freelance full-stack; and full-stack
developer then team lead at IC Group in Kyiv — where I taught IT courses at
night. BSc Computer Science, Ukrainian Catholic University. TEDxLviv organiser
for three years.
Home Hub <3
Every idea I want to try has somewhere to run right away, and it needs to know the
stack and resources I have available for it.
That's why I built the Home Hub.
Setup
Server - the workhorse. Core i9-11900K, 32 GB of RAM, an RTX 5090 with 32 GB of
its own, a 1 TB NVMe, Ubuntu. Every experiment starts here.
How the plumbing works
- GPU Gateway in front of the RTX 5090. Ollama, ComfyUI and a Whisper
transcription service sit behind it and nothing calls them directly. Jobs run in
parallel when their VRAM estimates fit and queue with an ETA when they don't.
- Traefik in front of everything with a wildcard internal domain: a new service
gets a name and a certificate from two labels in its compose file. No DNS ticket,
no port to remember.
- One sign-on for every internal tool, enforced at the proxy rather than in each
app: services that don't authenticate get it for free.
- A locked-down LAN: services are reachable through the proxy and nowhere else,
so nothing accidentally ships with an open port.
- AdGuard Home for DNS, on its own address on the LAN. It blocks ads for the
devices that can't block their own and serves the private domain zone, which is
what lets a new project get a domain the minute it starts.
- Omada gateway, switch and access points, run from one controller in a
container on the server, so the wired and wireless sides are configured together.
- A VPN back into the house, because most of these projects are never meant to
face the internet and still have to be useful when I travel.
- Shared Postgres and shared storage. A project that needs a database asks for a
schema, not a container.
- Zigbee and Home Assistant for the physical layer: lights, covers, sensors.
Micro Apps
Since vibecoding explosion - i decided not to use almost any SaaS apps without a huge
need. Building the small version myself now costs a few hours, with way more flexible
outcome. In addition nothing leaves the building.
Console - my dev environment. It knows every project on the machine and how to
build, deploy and maintain it here, and opens a coding-agent session in the browser,
so I can pick work up from my phone.
Finance - invoicing. Client tracking, invoice templates, a PDF editor. Replaced
DocHub for me.
Land - tracking for property listings near Lviv,
Ukraine. I'm looking for a property of my dreams, so it constantly monitors
available listings across sources and notifies me, when smth relevant pops up. Made
this public, since few more friends using it as well.
Tovarka - an ecommerce experiment factory. Rather than guessing which product
will sell, it runs many small shops cheaply and lets the winner pick itself: one
admin panel plans and launches an experiment, one storefront serves all of them on
their own domains, and Claude plus the GPU do the building. Ukrainian market, so the
main conversion is a call-me-back rather than a card payment.
ContentFactory - a video pipeline that runs on my own hardware. An LLM writes
the script, ComfyUI renders it with a vision model checking its own work, ffmpeg
cuts the vertical. It can generate AI TikToks, or stream
AI-narrated tales with their own art indefinitely.
Drawcadabra - a drawing game for kids. A child
draws on a big paper-like canvas and
the doodle comes back as a real picture in one
of twenty styles, generated on the 5090 in my flat. Colouring book mode, battle rooms
with anonymous voting, twenty languages.
Plush Companion - a soft toy that talks back.
An ESP32 hidden in the plush streams the child's speech to the server here, which runs
speech to text, a model, a safety filter and text to speech, then streams the answer
back before the child gives up waiting. No third-party cloud touches any of it.
Parents claim a toy by scanning the QR on its tag, then read every exchange in a chat
view with the child's own voice as playable notes.
And the ones that exist because an evening was free
Chess - small app that helps me to become a chess troll. Learning some tricky
combos when I have time. I've been playing chess since I was 3, my ELO is around 1200,
which is not high, but playing bullet daily :)
Ukr.gg - Currently down, but this was a hub for the game
servers I used to run when I had time, mostly for the smaller members of the family.
Minecraft and Rust
Cube - draw a picture on a Rubik's cube, 3x3 up to 7x7, and get the turn-by-turn
sequence that takes a real solved cube into that state. An evening was free.
Local AI, no cloud
I wanted a voice assistant in the house that speaks Ukrainian and sends nothing
anywhere. The language is the hard part: off-the-shelf speech models are noticeably
worse in Ukrainian than in English, and the distance between "understands you" and
"understands you unless you speak normally" is the whole product. So I
trained my own, a Whisper
fine-tune for listening and a Piper voice for speaking.
A dozen of those projects then wanted the same RTX 5090 at once, so nothing touches
the card directly any more. A broker queues the work
and estimates what a job needs from what that job type used the last time it ran
alone.
One thing still leaves the building, and it bothers me: the fairy-tale narration goes
out to a cloud speech service at three to five cents a video. A local Ukrainian voice
runs here now and hasn't taken that job over yet.
Workshop
The workshop is my dream. I like machines, and crafting things. Once, I'll have a
proper workshop, for now I just have there:
- Bambu Lab H2C for functional parts, enclosures and jigs.
- Elegoo Saturn 2 when a part needs detail an FDM nozzle can't hold.
- xTool S1 for cutting and engraving flat stock.
- A small woodworking bench for everything bigger than a print bed.
