That’s our first story about developers from Innocode’s Kyiv Office. The whole team is dedicated to building Scandinavian websites on WordPress.
Vitalik Pylypenko has joined us the most recently and does the “invisible work”, but a very important one — backend. Before that he spent 12 years in professional sport.
What brought him into programming and how he ended up at Innocode? We encourage you to read the story!
Vitalik, what brought you into WordPress and programming?
Initially I am from Poltava city. There I studied Computer Science at Poltava Polytechnic University, but the story how I’ve become wp-backend engineer is not connected with my studies (to be honest I graduated from the Uni only from the second time).
The WP story began when I applied to the coding academy, and ended up working in the Swedish company that launched it. It was 2014 and I was lucky because at that time it was totally free.
And now you are in Kyiv. Why have you decided to change everything?
Frankly I wanted to move, I wanted to grow. Also, I felt the need to switch more to the backend side of WP, because for all those years I was Frontend Dev. Very glad, that here at Innocode I can focuse purely on backend — after 2 year of creating markups, I got a bit tired, you know.
What are your plans? Are you happy with PHP?
Yes, I like it. Plans? As I said — to focus on backend. Maybe later I’ll switch to frameworks like Symfony, Laravel. But now there are lots of gaps in WP, which have to be closed. That’s why I’m still learning.
Moving to your personal side of life — everyone here keeps telling you are a very sporty person:)
I was into professional sports for 12 years. 8 years of swimming and 5 — Triathlon. Couple of times we participated in European Championships as team representing Ukraine. Then I had to leave sport due to the health issues and had to find a job:)
Was it hard to combine both — work and sport?
If you do sport professionally, then it’s impossible. I used to train 2 times per day for a few hours, 7 days per week. It’s hard to squeeze in a job here.
Of course, I still like extreme. Lately, together with my girlfriend we tried parachute jumps from 800 meters. It was in Lviv, and I expected that to be more frightening, but turned out I was not that afraid of heights, huh) Next year we plan to jump from 4 km with the instructor.
What else.. I’m fond of freeride, snowboard. I often travel to Dragobrat and Bukovel in Carpathians.
Last year I tried wakeboarding — it was a cable wakeboarding when you are pulled by the system of cables and not the motorboat. There we got to know one guy, professional wakeboard trainer, he invited us to Thailand to try serfing:)
In general, I would love to travel to as many contries as possible and try different extreme sports. Next year we plan to go to India for vacation. Would be cool to stay longer and work remotely from there, since the prices for flights are quite high from here and it only pays off if you stay there longer than a month.
Thanks, Vitalik for the interview!
Hey you) If you are not tired of creating markups, like this >>
>> we have a place for you in our team!
The requirements are pretty doable — http://bit.ly/2yIOvH4 , please ping us if you want to see us:)
