Alexander first found himself at a hackathon after his friend (and later on, co-founder) Maksim Diakov brought him to a Local Hack Day event in 2017. Maksim and Alexander had met at the university and quickly became friends. Having attended many hackathons, Maksim encouraged Alexander to browse the internet for them to visit and Maksim told him about Local Hack Day and brought him along. 

After the event, the two spent time researching Local Hack Day and decided to organize their own because there weren’t any in Russia. After that, they became addicted to the desire to change their local hack events to European and US quality level hackathons.  

Extremely interested in developing products, Alexander jumped on board with the project and worked with Maksim and later, Aleksandr Malyshev, to create the community that has turned into Russian Hackers. Alexander cares deeply about creating something of value for society whether that be a community, software, or events.

Hackathons have made a big difference for Alexander. They have strongly improved his soft skills and interaction with others. According to Alexander, hackathons are like expedited tech careers. You create your product and go through the stages with your business in a weekend. Through this, you learn much faster and can create more effective products. 

Alexander loves giving back to the Russian Hackers community and helping to empower hackers across Russia and the world. While he doesn’t code much anymore, he works towards developing the world of fintech and hackathons. 

His favorite hackathon project is from Junction 2018 where he and some friends were trying to solve a marketing challenge. They created a robotic arm that would be used at the usual supermarket wall where you can weigh sweets and buy them. The arm would pick sweets up out of their respective lots and deliver them to a pickup point. Sometimes, they used someone’s mouth as the pickup point.