Ilya founded Nerdy Production and leads its engineering. Before that he was CTO of QIWI, one of Russia's largest payment platforms, where he ran roughly 12 engineering teams spanning web products down to card processing, PCI-DSS scope, and contactless payments — including building contactless card payments on Android via Host Card Emulation over ISO/IEC 14443, with EMV Contactless (Visa PayWave) on top. He was also a principal developer at Yandex, where he worked on Yandex.Auto — taking native Android deep into the vehicle, with heavy CAN-bus integration through a custom CAN shield. He was also a principal at Evotor, whose point-of-sale devices run on a forked AOSP, giving him a low-level view of Android most app developers never touch. He has been building software since 2010 and shipping production Flutter since 2018, and now leads delivery on the agency's flagship apps — from the chart-heavy fintech UI of ExtraETF to the fully custom design system of Arcana. He writes most of the essays on this blog and maintains the agency's open-source work, including the dxpdf DOCX-to-PDF engine. He works across Flutter, Go, Rust, TypeScript, Kotlin, Kubernetes, and Docker, with a focus on app architecture, cross-platform delivery, and building teams that ship.
Recent posts
How to Generate PDFs in Rust with Skia: A Complete Guide Using the skia-safe Crate
Learn how to generate high-quality vector PDFs in Rust using the skia-safe crate — safe Rust bindings for Google Skia, the 2D rendering engine behind Chrome, Android, and Flutter. Includes code examples, a comparison of Rust PDF libraries, and production architecture patterns.
March 21, 2026Encryption Explained: From AES to Post-Quantum Cryptography and End-to-End Messaging
A practical guide to how encryption protects real applications — symmetric ciphers, public-key cryptography, elliptic curves, digital signatures, the quantum computing threat, and why end-to-end encryption in messengers like Instagram matters more than ever.
March 15, 2026Why 0.1 + 0.2 ≠ 0.3 and What It Means for Your Money
How IEEE 754 stores fractional numbers, why double should never be used for financial calculations, and which approaches solve the problem — from minor units to BigDecimal.
March 14, 2026HTTPS Made Simple: Getting a Free SSL Certificate
Why do you need HTTPS? What is a certificate authority? What types of certificates exist and how do you get one? Setting up nginx with Let's Encrypt.
July 21, 2021Databases and Indexes Explained Simply
How databases work under the hood, why indexes matter, and how it all fits together.
May 29, 2021