About Me

I’m a software developer with a wide range of interests: performance, architecture, operating systems and file systems. Below is a short version of my bio.

While being a kid, my first machine was a local clone of ZX Spectrum by Sinclair Research. It was booting up from a cassette tape and programs in BASIC could have been written with help of the built-in language interpreter. Then came an IBM PC-Compatible hardware, running MS-DOS and Win3x/9x thereafter. During that time I got interested in C/C++ and various systems like Turbo Vision, Win32, MFC. I was always curious about making of video games and played with the different approaches ranging from BGI and INT 10h to, eventually, DirectX.

That passion led to a creation of the first Barnaul-based video games studio called Stargaze Interactive, with me as a co-founder. During that period I was occupied with a management of all kinds, engine/toolset programming and miscellaneous tasks like system administration. After crafting about a dozen of casual games for PC, we’d found ourselves in the AppStore era and started a transition towards cross-platform games development. I made an initial overhaul of our engine, moving it from being locked on Wintel to supporting different target platforms. As MacOSX was our first non-PC target, I’d started to explore it thoroughly and gradually fell in love with Mac. Next, after spending almost a decade in video games industry, I decided to turn that page and left the company, which was acquired by our publisher Alawar.

By that time I was a Master in CS, graduated from AltSTU, and was getting a post-graduate education. My dissertation was devoted to researching local descriptors of image features in an aspect of computer vision’ tasks. It was later successfully defended in SibSUTIS, providing me with a degree of “Candidate of Engineering Sciences“, which is basically equivalent to Ph.D.

My other passion is related to file systems, file management and all stuff around it. That’s how I found myself developing a file manager for MacOSX called Nimble Commander. Since it’s a fairly large project for the one man army (i.e. ~100kSLOC written in C++/ObjC/ObjC++, 3 targets, lasting for 40+ versions to date), I found it to be a great source of different interesting engineering problems.

In late 2018 I moved to the UK and joined Synopsys.


Links:
email: mike.kazakov@gmail.com
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mike-kazakov/
GitHub: https://github.com/mikekazakov/