How databases work under the hood, why indexes matter, and how it all fits together.
Query and database performance is one of the areas we dig into during an AI code audit.
Ilya Nixan
Founder & Lead Developer
Ilya founded Nerdy Production and leads its engineering. He has been building software since 2010 and shipping production Flutter since 2018.
Before that he was CTO of QIWI, one of Russia's largest payment platforms, where he ran roughly 12 engineering teams spanning web products down to card processing, PCI-DSS scope, and contactless payments — including building contactless card payments on Android via Host Card Emulation over ISO/IEC 14443, with EMV Contactless (Visa PayWave) on top.
He was also a principal developer at Yandex, where he worked on Yandex.Auto — taking native Android deep into the vehicle, with heavy CAN-bus integration through a custom CAN shield — and a principal at Evotor, whose point-of-sale devices run on a forked AOSP, giving him a low-level view of Android most app developers never touch.
Today he leads delivery on the agency's flagship apps — from the chart-heavy fintech UI of ExtraETF to the fully custom design system of Arcana. He writes most of the essays on this blog and maintains the agency's open-source work, including the dxpdf DOCX-to-PDF engine.
He works across Flutter, native iOS and Android, Go, Rust, TypeScript, Kotlin, Kubernetes, and Docker, with a focus on app architecture, cross-platform delivery, and building teams that ship.