I’m Igor Khotin, a creative software designer.

I turn ideas into fun and playable code. Things like a handcrafted Collider.JAM game framework, or a retro-styled ReBasic programming language that tries to resurrect the 80s feel of programming, among other things.

Here are some factoids about me:

  • I started programming on a ZX Spectrum clone in the early 90s when I was 7 or 8.

  • I landed my first full-time developer’s job in the year 2000 and have been in the industry ever since.

  • One time, I had that Bulgarian-built MC6800-based microcomputer with a flat membrane keyboard, a black-and-acid-green monitor, and virtually no software. I had to invent and write some computer games to make it at least somewhat useful. So I used the most reliable human-memory-based source-control system for that. I would type in a game from memory each time I wanted to play - a little bit different every time, but still playable. I can hardly do the same trick now, and sadly, all that software is lost to time.

  • In the mid 2000s, I tried to develop commercial games for the web and mobile phones and then ended up as a back-end architect on a huge and overly ambitious Massively-Multiplayer Online Game project. I remember that at the same time, my former colleagues found investors and were building a cyberpunk MMOG. Everyone was building an MMO game back then. After the success of Lineage and WoW, these were the only types of games worth building. Well, the 2008 crash has ended the crazy investment cashflow into triple-As, and all people around me switched to social games and match-3. That was a depressing time. Big studios were closing all around the city. I remember visiting an event where local game developers, devastated by the crisis and the declining state of the industry, got really drunk and started a fierce bar fight. Needless to say, the party ended prematurely with broken furniture, shattered windows, fractured bones, and ambulances picking up the survivors of the unfortunate game industry crash.

  • I started to play with the cloud in the late 2000s, which helped me to deploy massively scalable social games in production.

  • Working with MMOs and social games pushed me into the discovery of NoSQL databases, since it was easy to hit the scaling limit of traditional relational DBs. It was not called NoSQL back then, really - it would take some time for the term to be widely adopted.

  • I used containers in production back in the 2000s, way before Docker was invented, and containers became mainstream. Well, they were not called containers back then. The concept still didn’t have a name and was really hard to explain. Later, when I was looking for a job, no tech interviewer could understand what I was talking about and considered me a strange lunatic with weird ideas.

  • Big/fast Data was a big topic when I started in the media industry in the early 2010s. That is where I familiarize myself with things like Hadoop, Spark, and Scala. Working with petabytes of streaming data and tens of millions of devices deployed in the field was a challenge in itself.

So it has been a long and bumpy journey over the hills of the tech industry.

Check out my current activity on GitHub. There’s always a game jam or something else going on.

Ping me on Discord, Bluesky or Twitter

And play some of my games on Itch.io