iOS Engineer · Designer · Creator
Senior iOS engineer who accidentally became the guy everyone comes to when something’s broken, slow, or missing. A decade of design before code. Currently happy at Raccoon Gang.
See my work
My path into programming wasn’t some childhood calling — it took three attempts before it finally clicked. But when it did, I found something unexpected: I genuinely enjoy the whole process. Not just writing code, but figuring out why something should exist in the first place and what’s the shortest path to making it real.
Long before engineering, I spent a decade in design — running a photo school, growing a YouTube channel to 56K subscribers, living and breathing visual storytelling. That background shaped how I think: every interface, every workflow, every solution starts with how a person will actually experience it.
At Raccoon Gang, I lead mobile projects — that’s the core of what I do. But somewhere along the way I started looking beyond the codebase. I’d notice a bottleneck in how we do presales, or a gap in onboarding, or a reporting workflow that ate hours every week — and I couldn’t just walk past it. So now I wear two hats: shipping mobile products and optimizing how the company works behind the scenes.
I’m also part of the Open edX community — and I treat it the way I treat anything I’m involved in: if I see something that could work better, I can’t just walk past it. No grand mission. I just like leaving things in better shape than I found them.
What I spend my days doing.
Swift, SwiftUI, UIKit — the home turf. Senior-level native iOS development, from architecture to App Store. 5+ years of building mobile experiences used by millions.
Flutter when budgets demand it, native when quality demands it. Cross-platform work always goes through native code review.
Vue, React, Python, Django. Powers the internal tooling arsenal. External-facing projects always reviewed by native specialists.
10 years of professional design experience. Every interface is intentional — from information architecture to the last pixel. Design isn't a phase, it's the foundation.
Real AI features that solve real problems. Not wrappers — production-grade intelligence.
Multiplying team output through Dutch Programming, process optimization, and removing artificial boundaries.
Finding bottlenecks and building solutions. From 24-hour setups to 2-hour deployments.
I’m part of the Open edX community, and I care about making it better.
Every major competitor gives students a free mobile app. Open edX doesn’t — and for many small clients, adding mobile means adding budget they don’t have. I proposed a universal mobile app that would let any learner find their school and just start learning. Custom branded apps would still exist as a premium option — this would simply lower the barrier to entry.
There’s also a bigger question: how does a small school or a solo educator even get started with Open edX? Right now, many of them don’t — they pick something simpler. That’s not a technology problem, it’s an accessibility problem. And those small users today are tomorrow’s growing platforms.
Watch: Open edX Universal Mobile App proposal
“We can do far more than we think we can.”
I say yes to ideas that scare me — and then I deliver. I’d rather set a bar that feels too high and pull people up to it than play it safe. Let developers talk to clients directly instead of playing telephone through three layers of management. And when a process slows everyone down — don’t optimize it. Ask if it needs to exist at all.
Always happy to chat. About code, about edtech, about pizza dough, about whatever.
stepanokdev@gmail.com