hello, world

hey, i'm mark. i'm a software engineer, i live in tokyo with my wife and my daughter, and this is my first real post. it's a long one, sorry. it's a story i kept to myself for a long time, and i'll get to why i'm telling it now at the end.

donetsk#

i was born and raised in donetsk, ukraine. we lived in azov, russia, for a short while, but most of my life was donetsk. our father was mostly absent, and everything was held together by my mother, who did an amazing job raising two boys, and later a third.

i was into computers from early on. my parents got my brother and me one fairly early, and it wasn't exactly a top model, so i had to tinker with it. stuff would break, and i'd go hunt for deals at the local markets to fix it. after a while i got interested in pretty much everything about computers. i even tried to learn programming with turbo pascal and got as far as a calculator. that's it, a calculator. i didn't speak any english, and there wasn't much fresh material in russian or ukrainian back then, so i dropped it for a while.

instead i spent some time being sort of a script kiddie. i hung out on all kinds of forums, talking to hackers and wannabes, and played with tools i didn't fully understand. i was always more into the red team side of things than the blue team side. same curiosity, pointed somewhere less useful.

2014#

when the war started and donetsk was occupied, i had a hard time there, because i didn't buy what the separatists and russia were selling. quite a few of the people who stayed did buy it, and some people i knew even joined them. i personally know people who died in that conflict.

my mother saw there was no future in donetsk and decided to move to russia. she asked us first. she wanted us all to go together, but my middle brother and i weren't ready to leave, so we told her to go and that we'd be fine. she hoped we'd join her later. it just happened differently: i left, and later my middle brother left for europe too. in between, my grandma was helping us a lot, and i'm forever thankful to her for that.

i lived there for two more years. there were times we sat down in our cellar, the underground storage where you keep potatoes and whatever, and yes, it was pretty scary at times, with missiles flying over our heads or landing nearby. our area got shelled more than once, including one of our neighbors' yards. once a trolleybus got shelled at the exact stop i used to take to visit my grandma. it's nothing compared to what people on the front line went through, especially after the full-scale invasion, but still.

and i wasn't doing great either. i was drunk most of the time, honestly. if i'd stayed, i think i'd have ended up dead, or drafted, or something like that. either way my life would have been a lot shorter and a lot less exciting. pretty depressing actually.

getting out#

i was lucky to have a sister. same father, different mothers. we're related by blood, but no paper could prove it, so as far as any government was concerned we were complete strangers (remember this, it matters later). she'd moved from lithuania to malta, settled there, and invited me to come. i said yes.

i packed one tiny backpack, mostly documents and a couple of shirts, and got someone to drive me out of the city. the border with ukraine was still open, and that driver definitely had some deals going with the people on the donetsk side. i went to mariupol, got my passport, and went on to kyiv.

kyiv wasn't the greatest experience. i barely had any money, even by ukrainian standards back then, so a hotel or even a hostel was out. i stayed with my grandma's friends, and i was very shy and tried really hard not to be a burden, but a few days later they asked me to move out. i was sure i'd be sleeping at the vokzal, the big train station. luckily my grandma found another friend who took me in, and i spent the rest of the time getting my visa sorted.

malta#

i flew to malta in 2016. since officially my sister and i were strangers, i had to go through the refugee program. that meant showing up at 6am and often staying until 4pm, over and over, for weeks, waiting for interviews in a place near the refugee camp that didn't look or smell great. i was lucky, i didn't have to live in the camp. i stayed at my sister's place, and to thank her i did pretty much all the house stuff and looked after her son, who was four.

i also started learning english, properly, for the first time. which is funny, because i always loved the us and that whole american vibe, watched tons of movies and youtube about it, and had a dream of a road trip from new york to california with a friend, by car or on a bike :) but i couldn't hold a conversation.

when my refugee status and work permit came through, my sister gave me two options. option one: have fun, do whatever i want, no strings attached, and in three months she'd land me a job as a janitor at the hospital where she worked. option two: use those three months to get the job i actually wanted.

i really couldn't picture myself as a janitor. i'd always wanted to be a programmer, and i'd done some html and css back in donetsk. so i took the three months.

it was the hardest thing i've ever done, i think. learning english, learning to program, looking after a kid while my sister was at work, and looking for a job, all at the same time. i was exhausted. thankfully my sister likes to have fun, so almost every weekend we'd have a good day out, or some wine in the evening.

the interviews were awful. most recruiters had no interest in me, same with the companies, and my english was so bad i could barely talk. it took longer than three months, but i was clearly trying, so i got more time. then one recruitment company got me an interview, and somehow they decided to hire me. 600 euros a month. i was so happy. it wasn't really enough to live on, but i didn't pay rent, so it was enough for me.

that's how it started: frontend, html and css, plus some php and javascript i had to pick up fast.

the beach#

a while later i was walking along the sliema seafront and saw this beautiful girl walking toward me. my english was better by then, but nowhere near good enough for a real conversation. so i froze. i stopped, pulled out my phone and just sort of swiped around on it, telling myself i'd talk to her when she got close. she got close. my heart was racing. she walked right past me and i didn't say a word.

scared of rejection, of not being able to say anything, of being awkward, all of it. i put the phone in my pocket and decided today was not the day i approach a woman (i mean, objectively, every man knows walking up to a beautiful woman is terrifying. there are memes about it for a reason lol).

and then something happened that i still can't explain. i was walking behind her, absolutely sure i wasn't going to talk to her. i caught up and ended up right next to her, on her right, fully intending to just walk past. idk why, idk how, i don't even remember deciding anything. i just turned my head and said hi.

it was her first day in malta. she'd come from japan to study english, and her english was about as non-existent as mine, maybe worse. when she said she didn't speak english, i said i didn't either. with simple words and a lot of gestures i asked if she wanted to go have some wine on the beach. she said yes, and we had a lovely evening, barely understanding each other and somehow figuring it out anyway.

we spent almost all of her three months together, going all over malta, and even to gozo. it's still one of the fondest times i look back on. even then i remember thinking: omg, thank god i made that decision and got the chance to leave donetsk.

when her time was running out, we both wanted to keep going. but she couldn't come to malta, because i was a refugee. so we decided i'd go to japan. that was a much harder call for me. to go to japan i needed a tourist visa from ukraine, with her as my guarantor, and going back to ukraine would automatically void my refugee status. another decision that could change my whole future. but let's be honest, a young adult, pretty much a kid, in his early 20s, is he going to think about that very hard? right? :)

tokyo#

after she left i actually got a promotion, because i was trying to save more money for japan. then i quit anyway. i was young and didn't know there might have been ways to keep the job, but it is what it is. i went back to ukraine for a few months, and with some freelance work on the side i saved enough for a ring and flew to tokyo in 2018.

she was working the day i landed at narita, so i had to figure out how to get to tokyo by myself. looking at tokyo from the train was something i'd never felt before. i'd never seen infrastructure like that, so many houses, built so dense, and i couldn't even see where the city ends. i was amazed by everything. then i waited for her that evening with my one backpack and one very small bag (yes, i left ukraine with one tiny backpack, and didn't have much more going to japan lol).

we spent as much time together as we could, and it was amazing. but i didn't want to rush, because neither of us knew what living together would be like. so i waited until the last two weeks to propose. she said yes and we got married. except by then it was apparently too late to switch my visa, so i had to go back to ukraine for a new one. that one hurt. i barely had any money, and the place i stayed that time was not great.

i came back on a spouse visa and landed my first job in tokyo in 29 days. i didn't stay there long. i got a warning for spending 20-30ish minutes in the restroom. god forbid a man has stomach issues.

the work#

i was still doing mostly frontend, then got curious about the backend and went full stack. then came the job i had the most fun at: three years at travelport, working remote and mostly async from tokyo with an office in kyiv, on travelcloudpro. it's a platform on top of the galileo gds and travelport's apis for travel agencies, because learning and operating galileo itself is really hard. booking, availability, refunds, exchanges, you name it, pretty much everything airline-related. i owned refunds and ticket exchanges, which took a gds operators' course to even understand. everyone on that team was smart as hell. it was the densest learning i've had, and i'm forever grateful for it.

then we wanted a kid, which meant a bigger apartment, which meant a bigger salary. so i moved to asurion, first as a consultant brought in to stabilize a struggling team, then as its tech lead, working on a device farm that lets you use real phones remotely from a browser. it was fun. on top of frontend and backend, i had a lot of freedom to do devex and platform stuff, and i moved a database handling millions of transactions a day to postgres without anyone noticing.

now i'm at cogent labs, building the company's new ai platform and leading that product line. i also moved our codebase to a monorepo with automated releases, which i'm maybe a little too proud of.

and yes, we had our daughter. she's four now.

the rest#

when i got permanent residency (oh yes, that was a big one), i finally started driving. i'd had a license for a very long time but just didn't drive until then. getting a motorcycle unlocked travel for me, and now we rent cars and go places as a family. i feel like i'm actually living now. it's amazing. camping is next.

at asurion i wanted to learn more platform and infra things, so i built a homelab, and honestly it turned out really good. it deserves its own post, so that's coming. and i still have a soft spot for security.

i'm also a big fan of open source. besides my own projects, i've sent features and fixes to a few, like pnpm, changesets and hyperdx, and if i didn't have to get paid, i'd do a lot more of it.

i used to run arch (btw, yeah i'm cool like that), but i was constantly fighting it. omarchy fixed that for me, and that's why i built omanow, because i thought it'd be cool. there's more in the works.

why i'm writing now#

for a long time i didn't feel comfortable sharing any of this. but recently i was thinking about it, and realized something: if something is only in your head and nowhere else, it's useless. it basically doesn't exist until it's out.

and i felt lowkey bad about that, because russia pretty much wiped out my childhood. erased it, completely. there's very little left from that time beyond memory, and even the memory is fading with time. i can't walk the streets i grew up on. most of the people i knew are all around the world now, and some are dead. there's almost nothing left to hold onto. we still have some photos my mother took with her when she left. and we still have the house as a family, but i can't go visit it.

we all pretty much grabbed our bags and went our own ways. only recently, for the first time in 10 years, we finally all got together again, and they met my daughter for the first time.

so if all of this stays only in my memory, it feels like it didn't happen. like it was never part of history. like all the people this war affected have no stories to tell. so i'm putting mine out there.

the rest of this blog will be lighter, i promise. mostly stuff i build, and some showing off about it.

if you're working on something interesting, or want to work together, say hi at mark@omarov.dev.