My name is Sacha Senchuk (pronounced /saʃa sɛntʃuk/), and I currently live in Toulouse, France, where I get to enjoy this wonderful view almost every day while commuting on my bike.

Most of my work is related to software development… but how did I get here?

I was 10 years old when I first encountered a computer. It fascinated me; interacting with it felt like magic. I wanted to understand how it worked, so I started to read books about computers and programming.

At the time, I was still living in Ukraine, and we didn't have a computer at home. I'd write programs on paper and “run” them in my head.

Our school had a computer science teacher, but he only taught upper-level students. For younger kids like me, there weren't any programming classes. I approached him and asked if he would teach me. He told me he couldn't make a special class unless I found at least five students willing to join and pay for it. It took me just a few days to double that number and find ten eager recruits.

So we kicked off our private lessons. We started with the basics: the DOS command line, and then we moved on to QBasic. The teacher's approach was unconventional, to say the least: he introduced us to QBasic by walking through the entire instruction set in alphabetical order. Each session felt like flipping through an encyclopedia of random instructions: ABS, ACCESS, AND, ASC and so on.

It didn't prevent more and more students from joining. As word of the class spread, more students wanted in. The room filled up fast, and demand became so high that, one day, I arrived a bit late and found there were no seats left for me.

Then, life took an unexpected turn. My stepdad, a neuroscience researcher, got an opportunity to relocate to France. So we packed up, and moved to Marseille. There, to keep learning, I managed to buy an old laptop with a grayscale screen that could just about run DOS. I kept learning QBasic on my own, I spent hours experimenting and figuring things out. My biggest achievement was a snake game from ASCII art and GOTO statements.

When we got 56 kbps internet, my attention quickly shifted to web development. I created my own website and I've set up a phpBB forum where people would ask me for help with small programming tasks. I figured out that this could help me to learn new things and be useful for some people at the same time.

Once, I helped a hockey club in Switzerland to generate a simple HTML page to print labels with their players' names. It was an easy task, but apparently it solved a lot of hassle for them, so they've sent me some Swiss chocolate.

For the first time, I realized I could create things that were genuinely useful to others.

I soon began contributing to Dotclear, an open-source project that offered a great alternative to WordPress and was especially popular in France. I made about twenty plugins around 2007-2008, then joined the Dotclear core team and created a diff tool to keep track of user changes to blog posts, and added a software auto-update feature.

The auto-update feature turned out to be my first big screw up. It worked perfectly well on its first update, so we thought all was fine. But, due to a missed checksum file update, the software would break entirely on the next update. It was easy to fix, but not before it disrupted quite a few Dotclear blogs. Sorry about that.

When I finished high school, I started studying maths and physics at classes préparatoires, a highly selective program in France focused on math and physics. Unfortunately, I had no more time to contribute to Dotclear. Later, when I moved to Toulouse to study computer networks and telecommunications at ENSEEIHT, I also had to pick up freelance work to make ends meet, which made me very busy.

After ENSEEIHT, it was not difficult to find freelance work. So instead of joining a consulting agency like most of my peers, I just kept working on different software projects, for different agencies, startups and entrepreneurs.

One of my last customers was Qotto, an energy provider company in West Africa. After completing their MVP, I joined to work full-time on their project, and this is where I am today.

For the past five years, I've been busy creating everything from scratch, building a reliable and scalable system, assembling a technical team, and establishing a well-structured organization that could keep growing with its people.

There were sleepless nights, but the journey has been incredibly rewarding. Witnessing the impact of our work on customers' lives and traveling to Africa has been both humbling and unforgettable.