Platforms by day, a language by night.
I’m Slavik Shynkarenko. I lead the Platform Engineering group at AutoScout24 and Trader — around 40 engineers across Germany and Canada, building the paved paths that several hundred other engineers ship on every day. 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 40 bespoke deployment pipelines and a permanent on-call tax. I’ve done both. The second one hurts longer.
How I got here
I’ve been writing software since 2008 — startups first, then platforms at scale. I became a manager the way most engineers do: I was good at the technical part, someone handed me a team, and I spent the following year discovering those two skills have almost nothing in common. Since then I’ve grown from first-time manager to leading leaders, through 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.
Miri
By night I’m building Miri — 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 a pipe dream in 2017: a language as ridiculously fast as C++ and as joyful to write as Ruby. It sat in a drawer for years. 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.
Everything else
SpaceCatalog.org is the open catalog of everything above us: 166,105 stars, planets, galaxies and black holes from six source catalogs, merged into one searchable index with an open API. The first of more space projects.
Away from a 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.