Engineering is what I do, but it’s not all I am. Here’s what keeps me busy when the laptop is closed.
✈️ Flying
I hold a night-rated Private Pilot Licence issued by Toronto Airways in 2014. Flying is the hobby that has shaped me most as an engineer — aviation demands rigour, checklists, situational awareness, and calm decision-making under pressure. The same mental discipline that keeps an aircraft aloft keeps production systems running at 3am.
I’m an active member of both the Aircraft Owners and Pilots Association (AOPA) and the Canadian Owners and Pilots Association (COPA).
🥾 Hiking
The GTA has more trails than most people realise, and I try to use them. Hiking resets the mental stack in a way that nothing else does — no notifications, no dashboards, just terrain and distance. The Niagara Escarpment and the Haliburton Highlands are favourites.
📷 Photography
Mostly landscape and aviation photography — the two hobbies overlap nicely. There is something satisfying about capturing a single frame that tells the whole story of a flight or a hike. I shoot with a mirrorless kit and do my own post-processing.
🌍 Travel
20+ years across continents, from Russia and Belarus through Europe and now Canada. Travel has given me a calibrated sense of how different cultures approach problems — which is genuinely useful when working across distributed teams in 10+ time zones, as I do at Backbase.
🚗 Cars & Motorsport
I appreciate well-engineered machines on the ground as much as in the air. I follow Formula 1 closely and enjoy the engineering narrative behind the sport — the aerodynamics arms race, the powertrain regulations, the strategy. It’s systems thinking at 300 km/h.
🚴 Cycling
Road cycling around the GTA keeps the commute interesting and the mind clear. There’s a useful parallel to infrastructure work: long rides teach you to pace yourself, manage energy, and not sprint too early.
🖥️ Home Lab
I run a self-hosted lab at home — Kubernetes cluster, monitoring stack, various services. It’s where I experiment with tools before bringing them to work. Half the things I’ve shipped at Backbase were first broken in my basement.
📚 Reading
Mostly non-fiction: aviation, history, systems thinking, and the occasional engineering memoir. Current reads usually involve either how something was built or how something went catastrophically wrong — both are instructive.
🎵 Music
Background fuel for deep work. I have broad taste — jazz for thinking, post-rock for writing, and whatever the mood demands for everything else.