About Me
I am a Software Engineer in Los Angeles, California. I was born on August 4, 1978, in Moscow, Russia, and moved to the U.S. with my family in 1990.
I’m married–my wife Linda is finishing her dissertation in the English department at UCLA. We’ve got two cats (Ansel and Teagan) who both need to lose quite a bit of weight.
I went to Santa Monica High School and then attended UCLA majoring in Computer Science. During high school and college I interned (and contracted) for Microsoft, working on Visual FoxPro and Windows 98. In 1998, however, I left UCLA to be the first employee at Scour–one of the first multimedia search engines founded by my friends from UCLA. After three years of ups and downs, we got sued out of existence by the MPAA and the RIAA. I then worked for Red Swoosh, and then a (now-defunct) consulting firm Skematix. I spent a few years leading technology at Kareo, building pretty cutting-edge software for the medical billing market. I also dabbled again at getting an actual degree from UCLA (this time in Economics, though). As of October 2007 I work at Hulu.com where I try to figure out how on earth to not get any more excited about working with a bunch of really bright folks doing very cool things with online video.
My technology interests include web services, application platform development, and mobile devices. My platform of choice is .NET (C#), though I was a big fan of PHP, and have developed software in C/C++, Visual Basic and a variety of other languages. These days I mostly work with MS SQL Server though at other times I’ve dealt with MySQL and Oracle, both of which I liked. I have a soft spot for PowerShell and am a long-time user of Linux.
My outside interests on the internet revolve around collaborative software and services. I’ve been somewhat addicted to Wikipedia, and more recently to Wikinews. I’ve written some minor open-source software, and run a few minor web sites.
If I think of something to say else about me, I’ll probably update this text.
January 14th, 2005 at 11:56 pm
Hee hee! You’re married!
February 14th, 2005 at 1:44 pm
i can’t believe you kept updating! what, is lj not good enough for you? nooooooo you had to make your own blog!!
May 13th, 2005 at 2:26 pm
Dear Ilya,
I’m very impressed with your background and the internet-based software that Kareo has created for the medical billing community. I came across an ad for an office manager/ executive administrator to the CEO this afternoon and have been researching the company background, which is how I happened across your blog. I love technology, computers, software. I find it all fascinating and know how incredibly intelligent one must be to do what you do. My husband is the Manager of Application Development for a large firm and has his own consulting firm as well. If you don’t mind my asking, I am very excited about the possible opportunity to work for Kareo, but what happened to Skematix? I see that Kate Casey did PR for them as well. It appears to me that both companies have the same business plan, so what went wrong? I’d appreciate anything you could tell me. I rarely come across a job that is exactly what I would love to do. My current job is not as challenging as was promised. If I were fortunate enough to get to work for Kareo I could go back to doing what I love. Thank you for your time.
Sincerely,
Shannon Linn
May 14th, 2005 at 9:57 am
Shannon,
Skematix was a consulting company with a number of different clients for whom we’ve developed software solutions. We spun off Kareo to be a software firm that solely focused on developing and marketing one of the products we were working on for one of the Skematix clients (with their participation, of course). I hope this kind of answers your questions. It is great to see you take interest in our company and do additional research about it — and I wish you luck in the interview process.
August 22nd, 2005 at 9:01 pm
well well well.. the Ilya lives…
(hi ilya!)
-neil
July 29th, 2008 at 2:31 am
Can Kareo be run from Linux, such as with wine?
October 13th, 2008 at 6:15 pm
More personal posts!
From the wifey who, four years later, is still “finishing her dissertation.” Really this time.
October 17th, 2008 at 6:35 pm
You proposed deleting
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HIPAA_compliant_email_postscript
which I accessed today and found VERY useful. Although I realize that I could delete your deletion proposal, I am not comfortable doing so (and would prefer that you reconsider.)
Although I appreciate the desire to have Wikipedia be scholarly, I resent having Wikipedia contributions deleted for “unscholarliness” because they make less available information (however dubious) that may (nevertheless) be useful. It would make more sense to me to hound the contributor to make his or her contribution more scholarly.