How Chess Helps Me Think Like a Developer
How a lunch-break chess game turned into a bullet habit — and why thinking fast at the board directly helps with the day-to-day job of a developer, especially now that AI writes the routine code.
read →Dmytro Krupenko
Backend Engineer · Engineering Manager · Team Lead
Hey there! I'm Dmytro — I like figuring out how complex systems work and making them actually work well. Most of my time goes into backend development and building products from scratch, and I try not to be afraid to rebuild something once it's clear there's a better way. Outside of code, I run — training for my first marathon, and honestly, it teaches patience just as well as debugging in production does.
In dev
—
Location
Kyiv, UA
01 · About
Ten Years in Engineering: From Code to Leadership
I'm a backend engineer and Engineering Manager with nine years of experience building and scaling SaaS products. I've gone from writing my first production services to leading a team of 7 engineers, owning both technical direction and delivery.
Along the way, I've built dozens of backend services, led a Kubernetes migration, decomposed a monolithic system into independent services, and reworked search so it runs 40% faster. But technical decisions are only half the job: I hire engineers, mentor them into senior roles, and build processes that let a team ship a release with confidence — not guesswork.
I'm equally comfortable diving deep into system architecture and talking with someone about their career growth. I believe a good engineer thinks not just about the code, but about how the decision behind it will be felt — by the user, and by the team that has to live with it.
role
EM / Tech Lead
stack
PHP · Python · Go
infra
AWS · Kubernetes · Elasticsearch
team
7 devs
experience
10+ years
based_in
Kyiv, Ukraine
looking_for
EM / Staff / Senior
02 · Blog
Blog
How I Almost Became a Bone Marrow Donor
My wife signed me up for a bone marrow donor registry, I forgot all about it — and a few months later I get a call saying I might be a match for someone.
read →03 · Contact
Let's talk
Open to conversations about Engineering Manager, Staff, and Senior Backend Engineer roles, as well as interesting projects and collaborations. Reach out — I read and reply personally.