About

I call myself a scingineer - an amalgamation of “scientist” and “engineer”. In my “previous life”, I used to study human brain using Magnetic Resonance Imaging (with fMRI, ASL, DTI and anatomical imaging). I got tired of “publish or perish” and switched to software development. Now I work as a programmer, trainer and technical coach (XP, LeSS) working at Odd-e.

I write code, read books, listen to music, juggle, cycle, do some martial arts and free dive. Topics that get my attention: brain, psychology, learning, education, complex systems, open science, linguistics, and unconventional business practices.

Timeline

  • 1975: Born in Tomsk, USSR

  • 1978: Moved to Dubna, USSR; home to “Soviet CERN”

  • 1986: Got first computer, Yamaha MSX. Gaming and self-intro to programming in BASIC.

  • 1991: Moved to Geneva, CH (Jan 1991).

  • 1993: Enrolled at the University of Geneva, faculty of Science, Physics.

  • 1995: Became interested in “brain” and “complex systems”.
    Part-time work at UniGE as a “monitor”, assistant to PhD students running physics labs. Wrote 1st non-trivial application to support “electrical components” lab (Windows 3.11, Delphi, C).

  • 1996: Summer job at the CERN’s Library. Started learning UNIX (Digital and SunOS) and shell scripting (ksh, tcsh) with Emacs. Created an HTML “app” for visual navigation of the library’s collection (with Mosaic browser).

  • 1997: Obtained Licence ès sciences physiques (BSc). Final research project: “Study of doping effects by Fluorine on Bi(2212) high temperature superconductors in powder and mono-crystalline forms.”

  • 1998: Obtained Diplôme en physique (MSc). Thesis: “Motion correction in Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging”.
    Started using IDL and TeX/LaTeX.
    Entered PhD program at the Group of Applied Physics under Prof. Pierre Descouts and Dr. François Lazeyras from the Dpt. of Radiology at HUG.

    Became sysadmin of all UNIX research workstations (DEC-Alpha, Sun Ultra). Introduced Linux as a cheaper and viable (able to run specialized software tools) alternative to commercial UNIX workstations.

  • 2003: Defended PhD thesis: “Epileptic Focus Localization Using EEG-triggered Functional MRI”. Continued work at the Dpt. of Radiology at HUG as a postdoctoral fellow.

    During my PhD and later, I estimate that 60 to 70% of my time was spent on writing software; IDL for image processing, C for new MRI pulse sequences, bash/perl/python for scripting. I’ve also built and administered a 3TB file server to store all our research data (RAID-0 with hot-swapable IDE discs using experimental 3ware controller) saving ~30kCHF of public money.

  • 2004: Moved to Singapore to work at the National Neuroscience Institute as a postdoctoral fellow under Prof. Xavier Golay.

  • 2007: Moved to Tokyo, Japan. Joined Philips Healthcare, MRI clinical science team. Joined Tokyo Linux Users Group. Co-founded Tokyo Hackerspace.

  • 2010: Moved back to Singapore. Quit Philips. 6 months sabbatical. Joined hackerspace.sg and Python User Group SG. Started helping organising PyCon-APAC/SG.

  • 2011: Got bitten by “startups bug”. Co-founded Ondelo (network services) and Teralogy/dacets (scientific data management, “git/github” for research data).

  • 2014: Joined Overseas Family School as education and technology research analyst.

  • 2016: Joined Odd-e. Started learning technical coaching (TDD/BDD, pair/mob programming, continuous integration,..). Joined the development team working on the LeSS site.

  • 2019: Full time embedded developer/technical coach/scrum master at Credit Suiss Singapore.

  • 2021: Full time technical coach/scrum master at Huawei R&D center in Europe (remote).