About

I call myself a scingineer - an amalgamation of “scientist” and “engineer”. In my “previous life”, I used to study human brain using Magnetic Resonance Imaging (with fMRI, ASL, DTI and anatomical imaging). I got tired of “publish or perish” and switched to software development. Now I work as a programmer, trainer and technical coach (XP, LeSS) at Odd-e.

I write code, read books, listen to music, juggle, cycle, do some martial arts and free dive. Topics that get my attention: brain, psychology, learning, education, complex systems, open science, linguistics, and unconventional organizational and business practices.

Timeline

  • 1975: Born in Tomsk, USSR

  • 1978: Moved to Dubna, USSR; home to “Soviet CERN”

  • 1986: Got first computer, Yamaha MSX. Gaming and self-intro to programming in BASIC.

  • 1991: Moved to Geneva, CH (Jan 1991).

  • 1993: Enrolled at the University of Geneva, faculty of Science, Physics.
    Working (evenings) at McDonald’s and doing private math tuition to earn some money.

  • 1995: Became interested in the “brain” and “complex systems”.
    Part-time work at UniGE as a “monitor”, assistant to PhD students running physics labs. Wrote 1st non-trivial application to support “electrical components” lab (Windows 3.11, Delphi, C).

  • 1996: Summer job at the CERN’s Library. Started learning UNIX (Digital and SunOS) and shell scripting (ksh, tcsh) with Emacs. Created an HTML “app” for visual navigation of the library’s collection (with Mosaic browser). Discovered Linux (SlackWare and RedHat).

  • 1997: Obtained Licence ès sciences physiques (BSc). Final research project: “Study of doping effects by Fluorine on Bi(2212) high temperature superconductors in powder and mono-crystalline forms.”

  • 1998: Obtained Diplôme en physique (MSc). Thesis: “Motion correction in Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging”.
    Started using IDL and TeX/LaTeX.
    Entered PhD program at the Group of Applied Physics under Prof. Pierre Descouts and Dr. François Lazeyras from the Dpt. of Radiology at HUG.

    Became sysadmin of all UNIX research workstations (DEC-Alpha, Sun Ultra). Introduced Linux as a cheaper and viable (able to run specialized software tools) alternative to commercial UNIX workstations. Discovered Python as a much better alternative to Perl.
    In 1999, I managed to save a couple of weeks of MRI patient data that wasn’t backed up (time before PACS). The primary hard drive on the MRI console workstation has failed. I took the disk out, put into my linux box, compiled a SCSI driver, mounted the drive and run fsck. Full data recovery.

  • 2003: Defended PhD thesis: “Epileptic Focus Localization Using EEG-triggered Functional MRI”. Continued work at the Dpt. of Radiology at HUG as a postdoctoral fellow. (thesis)

    During my PhD and later, I estimate that 60 to 70% of my time was spent on writing software; IDL for custom image processing, Matlab (because SPM, C for new MRI pulse sequences, Bash/Perl/Python for scripting. I’ve also built and administered a 3TB file server to store all our research data (RAID-0 with hot-swapable IDE discs using experimental 3ware controller) saving ~30kCHF of public money.
    After my PhD defense, I continued as a postdoctoral fellow at HUG. My research focus shifted from clinical fMRI (presurgical evaluation for epilepsy and cancer patients) to fMRI activity localization (trying to improve Talairach/MNI coordinates). This work ended up on the cover image of NeuroImage.

  • 2004: Moved to Singapore to work at the National Neuroscience Institute as a postdoctoral fellow under Prof. Xavier Golay. Our small (4 pax) research group did some amazing work on ASL, regional non-invasive perfusion and quantitative fMRI.

  • 2007: Moved to Tokyo, Japan. Joined Philips Healthcare, MRI clinical science team under Dr. Marc Van Cauteren.
    Joined Tokyo Linux Users Group. Co-founded Tokyo Hackerspace.

  • 2010: Moved back to Singapore. Quit Philips. 6 months sabbatical. Joined hackerspace.sg and Python User Group SG. Started helping organising PyCon-APAC/SG. Invited people like Wes McKinney (pandas), Jacob Kaplan-Moss (django), Kenneth Reitz (requests).

  • 2011: Got bitten by “startups bug”. Co-founded Ondelo (network services) and Teralogy/dacets (scientific data management, “git/github” for research data).

  • 2014: Joined Overseas Family School as education and technology research analyst.

  • 2016: Joined Odd-e. Started learning technical coaching (TDD/BDD, pair/mob programming, continuous integration,..). Joined the development team working on the LeSS site.

  • 2019: Full time embedded developer/technical coach/scrum master at Credit Suisse Singapore.
    Developing Developers @ LeSS conf.

  • 2021-2022: Technical coach/scrum master at Huawei R&D center in Europe (remote).
    LeSS friendly coach at Jago/DKatalis (hybrid).

  • 2025: Still with Odd-e and not planning to change. Mainly doing LeSS in Action trainings with Terry.