I’m Slavik Shynkarenko. I lead Platform Engineering at AutoScout24 and Trader — a global function, spanning Germany and Canada, serving the 800+ engineers across the entire portfolio of companies AutoScout24 owns. We build the paved paths everyone else ships on: developer experience, infrastructure, reliability, the boring machinery that decides whether a good idea reaches production this week or next quarter.
The job is part architecture, part leadership, part diplomacy. Mostly it is deciding what not to let people choose. Every paved path is a trade: local freedom for global throughput. Get the trade wrong in one direction and you have a golden cage nobody wants to use; get it wrong in the other and you have a bespoke deployment pipeline per team and a permanent on-call tax. I’ve done both. The second one hurts longer.
How I got here
I started in 2008 in Ukraine, writing web-server extensions at Helicon Tech — IIS internals, the kind of code where one bad assumption takes the whole server down with it. Then e-commerce and CRM platforms at 4ib: senior engineer, then CTO by 2014. That promotion is where I learned that being good at the technical part and being good at the leadership part are almost unrelated skills. I learned it the expensive way. By the end of 2016 I was thoroughly burnt out, and I left.
2017 was a gap year in the honest sense — savings, a little consulting, a lot of drifting. It’s also the year I opened an empty repository and started piling up ideas for a programming language, right before I moved to Germany and let the whole thing gather digital dust. Munich came with the guest-messaging platform at TrustYou, and in 2020 with AutoScout24 — reliability and cloud engineering first, then leading it. In January 2025 I took over Platform Engineering for the group. Somewhere in there: a master’s in computer science from Dnipro University of Technology, an organisational-leadership certificate from Harvard Business School Online, two reorgs, an acquisition, and the particular comedy of running one organisation across two continents and a six-hour time difference.
Most of what I know came from getting it wrong first. That’s mainly what I write about.
2024 and 2025 looked excellent from the outside — bigger title, bigger org — and were hard on the inside. A divorce, an empty new flat, a year spent on autopilot. What pulled me back was building things again for no better reason than wanting them to exist.
What I build
Miri is a GPU-first programming language, written in Rust, compiled with Cranelift. You write ordinary code; Miri compiles it to run across thousands of GPU cores at once instead of a handful of CPU cores in sequence. No kernels, no buffers, no glue.
It started as that 2017 pipe dream: a language as ridiculously fast as C++ and as joyful to write as Ruby. Then LLMs arrived, GPUs became the default place computation happens, and the idea stopped being nostalgic and started being obvious. I document the whole thing — architecture decisions, type system, the parts I got wrong — in the Miri devlog.
SpaceCatalog.org is the other one, and it’s the oldest idea I have. I’ve been obsessed with astronomy since I was four, staring at the craters on the moon and wondering whether someone had hidden Kinder Surprise toys inside them. SpaceCatalog is how I reconnected with that: an open catalog of everything above us — 213,698 stars, planets, galaxies and black holes distilled from 60,091,093 sky sources across sixteen source catalogs, merged into one searchable index with an open API. The first of more space projects.
Away from the keyboard
I shoot photographs — concerts, rain, river surfers, whatever the light is doing — and I make Neapolitan pizza with genuinely unreasonable rigour. 24-hour dough, 450 °C, zero compromises.
What you’ll find here
Three things, written as a practitioner rather than a pundit: engineering leadership, software engineering, and the Miri devlog. Real numbers, real mistakes, named tools. If a post could have been written by someone who had never done the thing, I didn’t publish it.
Say hi: slavik@slavikdev.com . I read everything.