Tech Nation Visa Personal Statement

Please explain why you believe you qualify for the Tier 1 (Exceptional Talent / Exceptional Promise) visa.

Explain the contribution that you will make to the UK digital technology sector. The statement should include answers to the following questions and any other information you deem relevant:

• Why do you want to come to the UK?
• What is your planned occupation in the UK?
• Which region or city of the UK are you planning to live in?
• How will the UK digital technology sector benefit from your work? (Examples of this might include the technological advances you will bring, the creation or new markets, the planned growth of a company, the activities you will take part in outside of your direct occupation.

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Anton Dmukhovskiy

|ant(ə)n dmʊˈkɒfski|

Age: 25 years old

Lived in the UK: 9.5 years
Company: Art Deco Code Limited

"I thought of the potentialities of our modern world. The new materials, the means, the chances to take and use. There are so many products of man's genius around us today. There are such great possibilities to exploit. To build cheaply, simply, intelligently."
Ayn Rand, The Fountainhead

The protagonist of the Fountainhead, architect Howard Roark, designs his buildings with their purpose in mind, and not according to publicly accepted standard such as having to have Greek columns. Just like him, I use materials and concepts available today, such as Node.JS runtime, modern JavaScript, Test-Driven development and Docker containers, to build tasteful, simple and effective software, and my vast programming experience helps me to be confident in myself.

I started my company, Art Deco Code Limited, as a software development house that focuses on modern code written in Node.JS that can be run in Docker containers on cloud infrastructure. As well as accepting commissions, it will provide solutions for business and home users. The core values of the company are user-centred design, quality of implementation assured by test-driven development, attention to accessibility and thorough documentation. Both business directions will be pursued according to the same high standard. Whereas hard skills such as in-depth knowledge of Node.JS, cloud and Docker will help me to bring the best software to the market, soft skills of professional communication in both written and spoken English and the ability to create a rapport with people will assist in building strong relationships with clients and partners.

As much work as possible (mostly npm packages) will be published to Open Source under the MIT license. Maintaining such packages then makes it easier to use them for internal development.

The portfolio of the company can be split into 3 groups.

Group A: software for working with media assets, mainly photographs, both for individuals and organisations.

The largest product in this group is Photo Management (sobes.io) -- a system for managing photo assets for media agencies and publishing houses. It can embed metadata into assets, store them in the could and index them for search with ElasticSearch. A cloud version is provided as SaaS, with image recognition and Store functionality to sell assets. The system has been implemented in PHP, however I've started to update it to Node.JS, using packages such as koa2-jsx and node-exiftool which I've created previously.

The main selling point of this product is the ability to work with metadata, and full support for a widespread IPTC standard. metadata.photo(s) domains have been purchased to market the software to businesses and people by explaining what metadata is and its importance. IPTC's conferences will be attended, and a membership in this organisation will be acquired to be able to network with representatives of the industry.

For developers, electroscope.io HTTP API will extract and embed metadata into files, and be billed according to the number of files processed. This, for example, will help owners of websites to ensure that pictures uploaded by their users always contain required metadata such as author's contact details.

Finally, consolidate.photo(s) is a portal for people who want to keep track of their uploaded material stored across social networks and photo websites. It lets users see where all pictures appear, download, upload and delete them in bulk. Also, it records URLs of generated previews on such websites to make sure users feel in control of their intellectual property.

Group B: software for development teams and Open Source contributors. This will affect other companies in a positive way. By placing products on the GitHub marketplace, a large audience can be reached.

At the head of this group is Testy (testy.cc) -- a tool for teams to gather metadata about their test suites. For example, if a project has 1000 tests, each of them will be made a separate entity with information about who wrote and updated it and when. When the test suite is run on CI, such data as time taken, pass or fail status and error text will be recorded against each test. This will help Quality Assurance engineers to keep track of problems, and managers to encourage high test coverage.

A novel CI service merging.io will allow tests to be run as lambda functions. This will increase the speed with which test suites are run and tackle the problem of interference of side effects. The solution will integrate with testy.cc and promote treating tests as pure functions.

Moreover, a service PRer.io will help team-leaders to monitor open pull requests, and number of reviews done by each team member. It will assist in maintaining peer review culture and encourage developers to review code more.

Group C includes projects Website Grove (websitegrove.co.uk) for people to create their own websites based on templates, integrated with icon, font and image search APIs, and rapport.bz, where mental health professionals can track their clients' progress by means of asking them to input how they feel on a linear scale. For this, and any other niche service developed by Art Deco Code, a free one-year license to Website Grove will be provided.

In conclusion, I've developed enough professionally to take full responsibility for my work. I've also a qualified Hypnotherapist where I've learnt about the importance of positive thoughts, actions and interactions, which helps me to achieve my aims, and help other people to achieve theirs as well. I'm submitting this application in search for an opportunity to grow further as a leader and become a role model for other people, bring outstanding quality software to the UK and other markers and create jobs, and improve workflows found in tech companies. I'm planning to stay in the UK and run business in South East London, such as New Cross area, where I've been living for the past 2 years.