Історії

While most teenagers are just looking for their calling, 14-year-old Stas Kozosvyst designs server architecture, implements AI solutions based on Gemini, and develops his own content encryption technology. The guy began his IT journey at the age of 7, and today he manages the development of the EdTec ecosystem of Avmira, has over 30 international certificates, and helps other teenagers launch their first startups for free. We asked Stas about how his platform works, how the project is financed, and how he manages to combine business management with school lessons.

I was building my first commercial website in 2005. If someone had told me back then that I would still be doing web development twenty years later, I would have probably been surprised. At that time, the Internet looked completely different. Many companies were not yet sure whether they needed a website at all. Social networks were just gaining popularity, almost no one was talking about cloud services, and most tasks had to be solved manually.

Daniil Zhabrovets, a 17-year-old student of Lyceum No. 1 in Zhytomyr, as part of the RJ 45 team, recently became the winner of the CTF Junior League-2026. This is a large-scale all-Ukrainian team competition in cybersecurity for young people (schoolchildren, students of vocational schools and universities), where teams solve practical tasks related to web security, cryptography, reverse engineering, OSINT, artificial intelligence, etc.

Is it possible to simultaneously ensure the quality of software products and write Ukrainian fantasy that sells in tens of thousands of copies? The heroine of a new interview on dev.ua proves that two seemingly completely different spheres can not only successfully coexist, but also complement each other. We talked with Iryna Grabovska about how development methodologies like SDLC and estimates help in writing books, why artificial intelligence will not be able to replace real creativity and automate the entire QA process, as well as the challenges of finding a job in the modern IT market.

Three Ukrainian developers — Artem Ivanenko, Maksym Shymon, and Serhiy Krasilnyk — have set themselves an extremely ambitious task: not only to create a «Ukrainian analogue of BlaBlaCar» as a product, but also to bite off a certain number of users from an international competitor. To begin with, at least directly in Ukraine.

Oleksiy Kuts, a resident of AIT, wrote on LinkedIn to reach the Ministry of Defense, called the academies of three cities, transferred from the rear to the combat unit after months of correspondence with the General Staff, and eventually managed to break through the wall of military bureaucracy and join the newly created IT vertical of the Armed Forces of Ukraine. We talked with Oleksiy about how the IT vertical works from the inside and which IT worker would be suitable for the position of army digitalizer.

When Dmytro Yanovsky stepped out of the airport in Tempe, Florida, at the age of 18, the first thing he realized was that you can’t survive here without a car. No public transportation, scorching heat, and nowhere to walk. No family nearby, no scholarship, no campus waiting. Just a suitcase, money from Ukrainian freelance work, and the feeling that making mistakes is expensive. Eight years later, Yanovsky became the first student in the history of California’s De Anza College to be accepted to both MIT and Princeton University at the same time. Then the Ukrainian went on to work at the legendary MIT CSAIL laboratory, interned at Pulley, and launched the Prox startup at Y Combinator. And in parallel, Dmytro founded the ULTA educational program, through which 15% of the first stream of Ukrainian students entered MIT. dev.ua spoke with Dmytro about his life journey, which included pasta for a dollar, a fateful phone call from Boston, and why he considers Ukrainian defense tech to be one of the biggest opportunities in the world right now.

Eight years ago, Gennady Tatarkin worked in a furniture factory and built a completely understandable professional life. Work, plans, the usual rhythm — everything changed in an instant after a work injury, when his hand had to be amputated. There were months of adaptation ahead, painful getting used to the new reality, dozens of interviews and rejections, after which, even if no one said it out loud, one thing was clear: employers did not believe that a person with a prosthesis would be able to work on an equal footing with others. At that time, it seemed that along with his hand, he lost his usual future. But today, Gennady works in the EPAM archival department, digitizes documents, travels from Bila Tserkva to the Kyiv office, undergoes corporate training on the use of AI, and is convinced: there is no business that he could not master if he allowed himself to try. Gennady told dev.ua how he survived the loss of his hand, why employers often create barriers for people with disabilities, and how, step by step, he regained simple things that once seemed impossible — from cooking potatoes according to his own recipe to tying shoelaces with one hand.

Hiding in a supermarket overnight for new boosters or trading your Audi R8 for a cardboard collection sounds crazy. But it's the reality of the modern trading card market. Today, they sell for millions, provoke robberies around the world and create a crazy shortage. From auction records to bidding wars on OLX for STALKER 2 cards - we explore the phenomenon of the most unexpected investment of the decade.

40 years ago, the world’s largest man-made accident occurred at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant. Tens of thousands of people joined the ranks of liquidators to contain the growth of deadly radiation contamination. Today’s story is about Serhiy Mykolayovych, who gave the Zone of Alienation for almost three years, working as a liquidator driver. He saw the first refugees from Pripyat, the incomparable nature of the Zone, hid radioactive equipment under tons of concrete and played music on the piano for his fellow liquidators. The dev.ua journalist talked to his father, a liquidator, who, despite his age, is an avid gamer, and his favorite game is the cult STALKER series, where he returns to familiar landscapes again and again.

36-year-old IT professional Oleksandr Vakhovsky works for two American companies at once. During the day, he is a Senior Software Engineer at SolidProfessor, an educational platform from Mountain View, where more than 300,000 mechanical and design engineers are trained. The rest of his time he devotes to the Travel Risk Group startup in North Carolina, which collects real-time data on travel risks in more than 90 countries around the world. The Ukrainian is a co-founder and Head of Engineering of the service. Oleksandr has what the IT community calls “the road through all doors.” He started with a business card website for $200, grew to become an expert consultant for over 250 clients in the USA, Norway, Switzerland, and the Baltic countries. He also ran his own online store and doubled the revenue of the company he was hired to work for for years.

Even before the start of the collaboration between the ATB supermarket chain and the game development studio GSC Game World, there was a lot of interest in the event. Jokes about having to queue in the morning to get the desired almanac turned out to be not an exaggeration, but a harsh reality. Literally in half a day it became almost impossible to get the almanac, collectors rushed to ATB like stalkers to the Zone Center to the Wish Fulfiller. A dev.ua journalist joined this hunt and tells how he managed to get the almanac almost in the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone, and also shares life hacks on how to get more diverse collectible cards.

Viewers of TV series and movies on Netflix and HBO Max have noticed that over the past year, a lot of swear words have appeared in the Ukrainian dubbing, and now Thomas Shelby in the Ukrainian localization of "The Pointy Hats" sends everyone not to their mother's house, but to f*ck. At the same time, in cinemas, the same "Superman" continues to speak with emphasised politeness. We spoke with Maryna Markovych, the operations director of the Postmodern studio, about why you can afford more on streaming than in the box office, how obscene language helps fight piracy, and why "sterile" language prevents Ukrainians from completely abandoning Russian content.

In the modern IT world, the issue of professional certification has long become a subject of heated debate and has divided the community into two camps. For some, the coveted «badge» from AWS, Google or Microsoft is an irreplaceable proof of expertise, for others it is just a formality that requires time and money. The truth, as always, is somewhere in the middle.

In Threads, a mobilized IT guy with the nickname oncceuponatime_dude keeps a diary about how he ended up in the army — from the «gentle busification» and a night in the CCK barracks to the first day in the battalion. He describes in detail what happens to a person in the first days after mobilization: fear, disorientation, absurd situations, and gradual adaptation to a new reality. In his posts, he also shows how his IT skills unexpectedly become necessary in the unit — and what army bureaucracy looks like through the eyes of a person from the digital world. With the author’s permission, dev.ua quotes the specialist’s posts, which may be useful to everyone.

After almost 20 years in HR in IT, where Olena Krapets rose to the level of HR Director, she decided to start all over again. The reason was not a crisis, but a feeling of «ceiling» and loss of drive. Olena deliberately went into a new field, began studying medicine and temporarily lost her income. We talked to Olena about why this step turned out to be logical and what her IT experience really means in a new profession.

Is it possible to organize a perfect vacation without ever speaking to the staff? It turns out, yes. In ULIS.Dudky, instead of the usual reception, a Telegram bot works, food and firewood are ordered via QR codes, and the only legal stimulus instead of Slack noise is the view of the forest from a huge window. We tested this format of “digital detox with comfort” just 40 km from Kyiv.

He created mobile applications for Nova Poshta and Epicenter, built a career at Genesis and Headway, but a full-scale war changed priorities. Today, Viktor Pavluchinsky, together with his team, is developing Pugach, an intelligent electronic warfare system. In an interview with dev.ua, Viktor tells why Smart-EW is about mathematics, not about a soldering iron, how to automate the "friend-or-foe" system, and why high-quality Ukrainian components are better than cheap Chinese imports.

In the last week, the world’s attention has once again been focused on Iran and the Middle East in general. After another wave of mass protests and their bloody suppression in January, the situation in the country began to develop even more rapidly and unpredictably in late February. On the last day of winter, after a series of military strikes by the United States and Israel, the death of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who had ruled the country for almost 40 years — since 1989 — was officially confirmed. The day before, it was reported that his son Mojtaba had taken over power.

On February 24, 2022, for many Ukrainians, moving was no longer an option. It became a matter of safety. 42-year-old Olga Artemasova, Global Head of Business Analysis Center of Excellence at Ciklum, told dev.ua how a temporary solution «for a week» turned into almost four years of living in the village — with a generator, an inverter, «Aunt Nina Mʼyaso» in contacts and a dream of returning to her native Kharkiv. What follows is her direct speech.

Valery Krasovsky, CEO of Sigma Software Group, speaks with dev.ua to analyze the company’s cooperation with British giant BAE Systems, explain the importance of European digital sovereignty, and name the promising Ukrainian projects changing the rules of the game on the battlefield.

On February 23, 2022 Senior Engineering Manager at EPAM, Kateryna Sushkova, did not believe that the next morning her life would change dramatically. She fell asleep in her apartment in central Kharkiv with her husband and son, planning a team meeting for the following day. At 5 a.m. on February 24, the family saw flashes of fighting on the outskirts of the city from their window. That same day, they headed west. Within a few months, the village of Berehomet in the Chernivtsi region became their new home. Kateryna told dev.ua about life in a small town, adapting after a forced relocation, and the transformations brought by war and a new reality. Below is her first-person account.

Relationships between colleagues can end in a wedding — or a scandal and dismissal. For business, it’s not a question of romance, but of risks: conflict of interest, influence on decisions, accusations of favoritism or harassment. dev.ua asked how Ukrainian IT companies regulate office romances and whether there are direct prohibitions.

Bohdan Shvets is a front-end and Unity developer with a terrible disease. He can write code, pass tests, and spend years honing his skills, but he can't physically come to the office because he's received hundreds of rejections from employers. We talked to Bohdan about remote work, which only exists in words, the fear of business in front of disabilities, and a system that leaves a person alone with his future.

After seven years in IT and a leadership role, Victoria Sinkevich resigned without a clear plan — due to illness and professional burnout. Today, she lives in Spain, develops her own astrology school, and earns more than in the technology industry. We spoke with Victoria about her journey from business assistant to astropsychologist.