About Illya Starikov

Illya Starikov is a Ukraine-born, San Francisco-based software engineer writing about computers, science, and the tangents in between. He works on Beam at Google, where the job is to make a screen feel a little more like the room next door. At home, his partner Taylor 🐝 and their three cats, Zuko 🐈, Bodie 🐈, and Mallory 🐈‍⬛, run the place.

Who? What?

👋 Hello, I'm Illya. Welcome to my corner of the internet. This is where I share what's happening in my life, algorithmically unelevated, unsponsored for flavor.

I'm a software engineer at Google. I mostly write about tech, life, and everything in between.

I have been passionate about tech since my first computer at four years old: a three-color, Russian DOS port with a sole purpose of playing Doom and Quake. As I learned programming, I became fluent in the algorithms, data structures, and concepts of computer science. Since I was a junior in college, I understood that artificial intelligence is the last frontier for human problem solving; I have relentlessly pursued AI ever since.

Where?

🌻 Ukraine is where my story began. First six years of my life: walks around the neighborhood with friends, mom's borscht, and grandma's barn roof that I would climb and pretend I was Superman. I live elsewhere now, but my blood will always be Cossack.

🌉 Bay Area, California is home now. Back in 3rd grade, a teacher asked where I'd be when I grew up. I wrote "a beach house in California"—still working on the beach house part, but I made it to California. The weather's perfect, the hiking's world-class, and the food scene never gets old. Where else can I get beach, mountains, wine country, desert, and Pacific coast trails all within a day's drive?

When? Why?

🌐 I've been writing online since 2014—about the time I first got Wi-Fi. Started with WordPress, tried Tumblr, even hand-coded sites with HTML/CSS and Bootstrap.

My projects came and went like seasons: thatFruitThing (an Apple blog nobody asked for), Answer Keychain (cheat sheets for Trivia Crack when that was a thing), and various portfolio sites that I'd update once and forget about. The domains expired, the servers shut down, but I kept coming back to writing.

🕸️ Looking back, I spent way too much time worrying about imaginary readers. Would people like this? Is it interesting enough? Should I write about this instead? These days, I write what I want to read. If it helps someone else, great. If not, at least I got it out of my head.

My mission now: Empower readers with the ideas and insights I've learned over the last decade through writing. ★