Andrii  is one of our most active members. He puts his soul into our projects and has repeatedly supported educational initiatives. This includes giving lectures for children, recording video lessons, and providing reviews of educational programs. Andrii is a co-founder of the “IT-Chovnyk” project, and also actively participates in the process of creating videos for schoolchildren in a joint project of the Ministry of Digital Transformation of Ukraine, the Ministry of Education and Science and other clusters.

🔹First acquaintance with IT

In Odesa, there are 2 most promising ways for a child without initial financial capital — either the sea or IT. Since there are many sailors in my family on the male line, I thought about going to sea, but I was lucky, my father was just at home between flights when I decided to leave school for the naval school and was able to convince me by sending to the of “computer scientists”. So I immediately began to make up for the gaps in knowledge, studying course after course at various IT academies in parallel with school. In parallel with this, I started a preparatory school for admission to our Polytechnic at the Department of “Computer Systems Institute”. After finishing my master’s degree and entering postgraduate studies, I simultaneously started trying to quit various non-core part-time jobs and get a job in my specialty. My first attempt to become a programmer at Luxoft failed for various reasons. But the second time for the QA position in the then Lohika was crowned with success, although I will be frank about QA, I did not know that much, but I had a good technical base. There, step by step, I began to develop as a specialist, simultaneously studying automation and understanding the basics of management. As a result, in the Lohika company, I reached the Team Lead of a team of 15 QA engineers, making the decision to change the company. That’s how I ended up at DataArt as a Project Manager and at the same time engaged in private teaching at Fabrika courses, in which I took an active part in the launch. Actually, from this moment, my most active chain of participation in the life of the IT community in Odesa begins. As a teacher, I have graduated hundreds of QA manual and automation students who are currently working in top companies represented in Odessa, including DataArt. And I in the company went through a rather rapid stage of development from Project Manager to the first Delivery Manager in the location, and then to Head of Office and Delivery Director.

🔹Your role in Odesa IT Family?

DataArt is one of the founders of the IT Family, and I am actually one of those who participated in it, even before the official launch. Today, I am the representative of DataArt in the IT Family, and since I have extensive experience in educational projects, I lead most of them under the auspices of the IT Family. For example, together with the cluster and IT-Chovnyk charitable foundation, we launched an educational initiative to build modern computer classrooms in remote villages of Ukraine and a project on IT literacy for local children, and together with the Ministry of Digital, we launched a project of educational videos for all schoolchildren of Ukraine.

🔹What does the cluster bring to your company?

IT Family helps unite the IT community of Odesa, gather its most active representatives under one roof. And together we can always take on more ambitious and interesting projects than alone. IT Family turned out to be the “glue” that helped unite seemingly completely different companies and their representatives together, giving them a common goal — the development of IT in Odesa. Together.

🔹What plans/projects do you plan to implement in 2023 at Family?

In 2023, my personal plan is at least to complete the cycle of educational videos for the Ministry of Digital, and this is not an easy task — just the preparatory work on the scenarios of the videos themselves requires enormous efforts of many people, and even then it all has be transformed into video. And I would also like to launch several joint projects with IT Family and my personal educational project — the Telegram channel “Cozy Galera”, I am currently actively thinking about possible formats of such interaction. But this is all secondary. The main thing is the victory of Ukraine in the war, and any project in Family that can somehow bring it closer automatically becomes a priority for me, so in my personal plan I quite allow some adjustments.