Ilya Nixan

Founder & Lead

Founder & Lead Developer

Flutter architecture and leading delivery teams

Flutter Dart Kotlin Swift Kotlin Multiplatform SwiftUI Go Rust Ruby TypeScript Vue Nuxt Angular Tailwind CSS Strapi Android Docker Kubernetes

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.

Everyone Got the Timeline Wrong: AI, Juniors, and Quantum

Two years ago the loudest voices in tech said software engineers would be obsolete by now. They were wrong: developer employment did not collapse. But the same wave that failed to remove developers removed something else — the routine work that turned beginners into seniors. Employment of developers aged 22 to 25 is down roughly 20% since late 2022 while their older colleagues held flat or grew. Meanwhile quantum computing is running the identical hype cycle one lap behind, and the milestone that actually matters is not the one in the headlines. Here is what the evidence supports, what it does not, and how to tell the two apart.

August 18, 2026

Software Engineering

dxpdf 0.5.0: Teaching a DOCX Converter to Read the Rest of the World

dxpdf converts Word documents to PDF without Office, LibreOffice, or a cloud API. Version 0.5.0 is the release where it stopped quietly assuming every document is written in English — UAX #14 line breaking, UAX #9 bidirectional text, and CLDR-driven numbers and dates that follow the document's own language. Here is what shipped, the design decisions behind it, and the measured numbers.

August 11, 2026

DevOps

Orosu: Why We Replaced SSH Deploy Keys With Signed WebSocket Jobs

Every CI pipeline eventually has to get a build onto a server, and most teams solve it with SSH keys in secrets and a copy-pasted rsync script. We built Orosu instead — an open-source Rust tool that turns deployment into an authenticated, bounded WebSocket job instead of an open shell. Here is the problem it fixes, how it works, and where its edges are.

August 8, 2026

For Founders

Flutter App Maintenance Cost in 2026: What You'll Actually Pay After Launch

What Flutter app maintenance actually costs after launch — the 15–25%-of-build-cost rule of thumb, what drives the number, and where a single codebase saves real money.

August 4, 2026

Cybersecurity

How End-to-End Encryption Actually Works: Key Exchange, the Double Ratchet, and Its Real Trade-offs

A deep dive into how end-to-end encryption is established and kept secure over time — the X3DH handshake, the Double Ratchet algorithm behind Signal and WhatsApp, group messaging with sender keys, and an honest look at what E2EE protects and what it does not.

August 3, 2026