2024 → 2025

The year has come to an end, during which a multitude of truly extraordinary events occurred in my life. In fact, as I reflect on this, I realize that I describe each year in a similar way. After all, something unexpected happens every year. In this brief summary, I would like to highlight a few of the most important moments.

Building My Ideas

I try to find inspiration in various things, including personal projects and experiments. I successfully launched the Wonderful Plugins project — a series of small plugins for Figma — and received a lot of positive feedback. Thanks for your letters with feature requests, bug reports, and ideas! My friend Ertem and I also launched Haptics, an app where you can communicate with friends through the language of haptics, emojis, and drawings. Additionally, Ertem finally released Reality — an idea that we had back in 2023. In Reality, you can leave content not just on a map, but directly in augmented reality. Besides that, I’ve been experimenting extensively with Xcode, creating prototypes. By the end of 2024, I was posting on X less than I would have liked. But I promise to change that. I want to do more for the community and hear your thoughts. And there are a lot of things I’m thrilled to show you during this year!

amoamoamo

After a year of working at Oops, I transitioned to amo, a project founded by the Zenly team. I had been a huge fan and active user of Zenly since my internship at VK. On my first day as an intern, I was shown several applications that designers actively use. Among them were Zenly, Poparazzi, and Swarm. Since then, I have been following updates and dreaming of becoming a part of Zenly. Then came the news of its closure, the mysterious new company, the period of using Blink as a substitute for the now-defunct Zenly, and finally, after several rounds of interviews and test assignments, I am now part of the team. The way my days at amo unfold deserves a separate article, which I will definitely write. I want to describe it in vivid detail. In essence, my new job has brought me to a new place.

Becoming Parisian

In this paragraph, the most important point I want to highlight is that I moved to Paris without having been here before. Yes, I agreed to swim, knowing nothing about the river in which I would be swimming. To be honest, moving is not a pleasant experience, at least for me. Several moves before this one really wore me out. And, as you guessed, I want to share all the details of the move in a separate article. Paris is a very pleasant and diverse city. It welcomed me quite warmly, successfully breaking many stereotypes familiar to all of us. Even in Russia, I enjoyed greeting and having mini-dialogues with staff at cafes, restaurants, and other public places. For the locals, this is part of the culture. So far, my language level does not allow me to maintain a conversation, but I am trying. Honestly. It has already been six months since the move, and it’s hard to say whether this is the city where I will stay for a long time. But for now:

Sincères salutations,

Ilia