Hey 👋 My name is Maksim Zhashkevych. I'm self-taught software engineer, content creator and entrepreneur. As a kid, I was very curios about computers & software and that's how I've started to dig deep and learn about software development.
My main source of knowledge were and still are youtube videos, articles & online-courses. I believe that you learn best from people who practise what they preach, by consuming information and using it in practical ways: building your own pet-projects, writing code, contributing to open-source, etc.
A little more over 2 years ago I've started posting articles on Medium to share my knowledge about backend development and Go programming language.
In summer of 2020 I've created ebook called "Go Language Fro Beginners" (Actually, it is "Язык Go Для Начинающих", all the educational content I produce is in Russian). It gained some traction & I received a lot of positive feedback. That gave me the energy & enthusiasm to continue creating more useful stuff. I've started posting regularly in my Telegram & YouTube channels.
After some time I've realised that I want (and can) monetize my hobby, by creating paid courses so I started working on my second book called "Modern Web Applications Architecture". But soon I've realised that sharing it in PDF has some downsides to it and decided to package it as an online-course. I've started to look for a software, that would provide me with ability to post materials, gather analytics & connect payment system. I tried & tested different LMS (Learning Management System) and realised that none of them I enjoy enough to use it for my projects.
And then the Creatly was born.
In the beginning of 2021 I've started to prototype the UI and design the architecture. Later I've told my friend and senior frontend developer about the idea and he agreed to work with me on it. Also I have shared the process behind building Creatly's backend on my YouTube channel and that helped us to find even more developers to join our friendly team.
We had the vision to build this product and monetize it as SaaS (Software-as-a-Service), via subscription model. But In the November of 2021 I've came to conclusion that I want to make it open-source and work on another interesting project.