Hi again, I’m Ivan.

I’m a software engineer from Varna, Bulgaria, now living in London. I write code, play eight-string guitar, and spend a lot of my free time playing tennis. I also have a habit of turning gift ideas into programming projects.

My degree is in Psychology and Sociology from Aston University. For my dissertation, I built a visual attention experiment to see whether lo-fi beats changed how people responded to what they saw. I prepared the audio in REAPER, ran the study with EEG, and spent a lot of time in Python and MATLAB making sense of the recordings. The music effect was inconclusive, but getting from a question to real data was fascinating. People, music and code ended up in the same project. Those interests have stuck around.

What I work on

I’m a Senior Software Engineer at Mabyduck. We help teams evaluate the quality of AI-generated audio, images, video and interactive experiences by putting them in front of real people. I build the tools for setting up those studies and connecting them to customers’ workflows, mostly with Django and TypeScript. I also co-authored our study of interactive AI avatars.

Before that, I worked on clinical research tools at IQVIA, semiconductor software at ASML, a voice-operated assistant at Conigital, and data analysis at Keysight. It’s been a fairly varied route into the work I do now.

Side projects

My latest project is Kajizele, a shared photo album for events. Guests scan a QR code and add their pictures from their phones. I love photography, and I like seeing the same occasion through everyone else’s camera.

Kaminka-Pi started as a birthday present for my girlfriend, Kami, when we were long-distance. She made me a Stardew Valley cross-stitch; I made her a Raspberry Pi frame that shows our photos and her Spotify album art. It involved learning to solder, and it was a little late for her birthday.

I’ve also built Amirami, a Bulgarian perfume shop, and I tinker with services on my home server. Linux, open-source software and Neovim are very much my thing. I’m usually working with Python or TypeScript, with an interest in Go and the occasional return to C++.

Away from the keyboard

Tennis is a big one. So are guitar, taking photos and travelling. I read a lot of sci-fi, with biographies and other fiction mixed in, usually with a coffee nearby.

If any of that sounds like your sort of thing, say hello.