My name is Oleksandr Pustovalov. I live in the city of Kyiv, Ukraine.

I have been involved in software development since 2001. However, even in my school years, I was passionate about programming as much as my old ZX-Spectrum allowed.

As a student, I studied in the city of Lviv, at the state university "Lviv Polytechnic". As soon as I graduated, I found a job in a bank. There, I tried to write useful programs for the bank in C++.

But my first serious software development was at Ukrtelecom - there is such a provider in Ukraine. It was a billing system for internet access for dial-up connections.

It was indeed a system - it consisted of several modules, and the modules were written in different languages: C++, Java. The system even passed state certification. Back in 2003, I didn't understand that I had made a microservices system.

Next, I decided to seriously study Java, and I worked at a company where a very large billing system for a cable TV provider was written in Java. There I gained enormous experience not only in the development of large enterprise systems but also experience in managing a team of developers as I became the team leader.

At that time, due to the rapid growth of outsourcing companies in Kyiv, I decided to venture into this sector for better financial prospects.

I worked at several large companies, such as Luxsoft, NetCracker, Ciklum, and a few small ones. Everywhere I worked on Java development for Enterprise. Strangely enough, I never tried to get Java certifications, so I don't have any.

Naturally, over the course of my work with Java, I didn't only work on the backend, but also had to tackle frontend development. At that time, in the Java community, frontend and those now called frontend developers were not highly respected. But I enjoyed creating various beauties with CSS. And then I liked working with JavaScript.

So the idea was born to create a web interface builder for a web application. Without getting into too many details, the implementation of this idea proved to be a slow process. It's hard to work for the company during the day and write software in a completely different language and for a different environment in the evenings.

But eventually, I discovered React. It was love at first sight. I'm not afraid to say that I had the same approaches in writing an application before - I divided everything into components. This reflected knowledge of development patterns, which are widely used in Enterprise Software.

And with the arrival of React, I managed to create my first builder, on which one could create something and it worked. It was React-UI-Builder.

After its submission on HackerNews, it received a shower of stars on GitHub, collecting over 5000 stars within a week. And I decided to fully transition to the frontend side.

I tried to develop React-UI-Builder into a full-fledged product. However, perhaps because the builder did not solve any tasks to simplify the creation of applications on React, I couldn't evolve the builder into a full-fledged product.

So I deleted the entire repository. But I didn't stop trying to create my own product. Having rich experience in creating builders, I made Webcodesk. Webcodesk really helped to create a web application from ready-made components and logic.

The Wix company noticed Webcodesk and invited me to try adapting or reworking it for their ecosystem. But something went wrong and they closed this project. Webcodesk, as per the terms of the agreement, stayed with Wix. You can view its code on GitHub.

After 2 years of working at Wix, I decided to create a product that people really need...

If you have any questions or want to contact me, write on Twitter, or just email me.