From copying BASIC by hand to shipping products in the open.

I was born and raised in Taganrog, a town in the Rostov region of Russia. One day my father brought home a ZX Spectrum — local engineers assembled them at his factory and sold them on the side. It felt like pure science fiction. The machine came with a book on BASIC, and I would copy the examples line by line. The programs actually ran. That was magic.

Back then that was all I could do — copy examples and play games, waiting for them to load from a cassette deck with those unmistakable screeching sounds. Then the years went by. I studied something unrelated, life got in the way, and one crisis after another pulled me away from code. I even forgot I had ever "programmed" — all I'd done was copy examples.

I fell for photography instead and gave it years of my life, until it became my profession. Then came another crisis, and I ended up driving a taxi. Eventually I moved to Moscow. I still had my camera gear, so I shot cars at a dealership while chasing portrait and wedding jobs around the big city.

The photography world pulled me back toward code before I realized it: I taught myself HTML, CSS and how to build WordPress themes for photographers. Those skills were enough to land my first job — I still barely knew any JS, so I read JavaScript: The Definitive Guide during the hour-long metro commute there, every day. At that job I felt a stubborn urge to build something of my own and share it. That's how I discovered open source — and it's had me hooked ever since. From that clueless beginner I worked my way up to lead developer, including at MTS, one of the largest tech companies in Russia.

Today I'm a product engineer who builds across the stack with TypeScript — Vue and Nuxt on the front, Node and Electron behind it. My favorite work still lives in the open: massCode , my biggest project, grew into a free, local-first workspace where developers keep snippets, notes, API requests and utilities in one place. I also built MySigMail as open source that later turned into a SaaS. Of my photography days only a portfolio remains at ph.antonreshetov.com ; these days I mostly point my camera at my family — above all, my darling daughter — in my free time. None of this would have been possible without my beloved wife, who has stood by me through every crisis and every fresh start, and never stopped believing in me.