About Me

I’m Andrey. I live in Haʻikū, on the north shore of Maui, with my wife Ivy and our two boys. I build software for a living and build things around the house for reasons I find harder to explain.

How I got here

I started freelancing as a web developer in 2008, while I was studying at Queens College in New York. For a few years after that I taught kiteboarding — New Jersey in the summers, the Dominican Republic and Brazil in the winters. I got my IKO Level 2 instructor certification in Miami in 2014.

The winter I decided to switch to software full time, I was teaching twenty-eight kite lessons a month and learning Objective-C between them. I failed my first real coding interview. I got a 2.5 out of 5. It took another year of building apps nobody asked for before anyone hired me to write iOS code.

Since then I’ve spent about a decade building apps and the teams that ship them — video SDKs, streaming products, and for the last several years, sports. Mostly iOS, often the backend behind it too.

Why Maui

We moved for the wind and the water and stayed for the rest of it. We bought a house in Haʻikū in 2023 — an old plantation-era place that has needed something every month since. I kite and wingfoil at Kanaha, usually with my older son standing on the board in front of me these days, and I train jiu-jitsu badly but consistently.

What’s on this site

Two things I actually do:

• DIY — what I built, what it really cost, and what I’d do differently. Real numbers, real mistakes, photos of the actual thing.
• Raising kids — the part nobody hands you a manual for.

There’s also an older archive here from my New York years — coding write-ups and CrossFit Open analyses, most of it from 2016 through 2021. I’ve left it up. It’s dated, but it’s mine.

I write when I’ve actually built or learned something, not on a schedule. If that means months between posts, that’s the honest version.