Oleg Baranovsky Personal Homepage

This is my primary personal space on the web. The main address for this page will always be http://oleg.baranovsky.org/, however there are several redirects from my pages at some other online projects I have. Here is also my personal pictures page.

About

My name is Oleg Baranovsky. I am computer professional, Web developer, IT manager and serial entrepreneur. I was born and raised in Kiev (aka Kyiv), Ukraine. And, after living in many wonderful places, I currently settled in Los Angeles, California. Nevertheless I still have very strong ties to my friends in San Francisco and SF Bay Area, where I used to live for many years.

I am currently working as a Director of Business Strategy and Technology at Financial Finesse, Inc. – an unbiased financial education company, which is pretty much their fancy way to describe the CTO role.

I am also the organizer for the Los Angeles PHP Developers Group – a meetup group of some 500 and growing web developers in the Los Angeles/South California area. I am also running (or otherwise involved in) a number of other developer groups and web projects, some of them are listed below.

Extended Bio

I have been involved with software and web development for quite a long time now. I started as a C/C++ programmer and co-founded my first research/development company dubbed "Parallel Worlds" under the roof of the Kiev Polytechnic Institute (a kind of Ukrainian MIT) doing some research on parallel networks.

Later I moved to the IT management role at the US Embassy in Kiev, Ukraine (US Department of State). There I got really interested in all things web and the US post in Ukraine became one of the first US missions abroad to have their own web presence (I developed their first web pages). I also consulted other US missions in Western Europe, such as US consulates in Frankfurt and Paris.

Click to view my Personality Profile page

In 1995 I started UA Zone.net – The Ukrainian Information Project. It was one of the first English speaking web projects in Ukraine and about Ukraine. It features an extensive guide to Kiev and Ukraine, one of the largest online picture galleries of Ukraine, Kiev (Kyiv), Lviv and other Ukrainian cities as well as travel pictures from our hiking trips to Crimea and Carpathian mountains.

UA Zone project quickly gathered an online community of extremely talented people and became a sort of unofficial web incubator, helping to jump-start many other Ukrainian web projects. A number of Ukrainian web design studios and online businesses went through our hands or were touched by us in one way or another, many of whom are very successful nowadays.

UA Zone also became the platform for many online non-profit and public interest projects, driven by enthusiasts. Some of the projects created under the UA Zone umbrella are:

In the year 2000 I decided to join the dot com revolution and moved to San Francisco in November 2000, working for the IT consulting company Taos Mountain. Little did I know that I moved there at the very verge of the first dot com crash :-) and many of my consulting gigs ended up being trying to save or outright dismantling some of the failed dot coms, akin of GirlGeeks etc.

In the mid 2001 I helped to co-found several computer businesses, including few web projects and an outsourcing business.

After moving to Los Angeles I took on as Director of IT and later a CTO for Financial Finesse, a leading financial education company offering unbiased financial education and guidance to employees and members of many companies, organizations and financial institutions (such as credit unions). Here I am running the entire IT infrastructure, including the data center facility, as well as developing a lot of online tools, including pretty unique online content delivery system, online content and tools as well as interactive Financial Learning Center.

While in LA, I also started several online projects, still in development and also helped my friend to jump-start another successful software development outsourcing company, which I an still actively involved with. I also participate in several development groups here in Los Angeles/Southern California area, including the PHP Developers Group, where I am the organizer, as well as some other Meetup groups, most notably MySQL and Semantic Web.

My other tech interests include, among others, computer security (I am a partner at a computer forensics business), as well as various open source software projects.

I got my MS in Physics and Engineering from Kiev State University in 1993 and also have a number of professional certifications.

Twitter Updates

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Contact

Email address: oleg -at- uazone -dot- net

For secure communications here is my PGP/GPG key.
Key ID: 0xC7F6DFA6
Key fingerprint: 4916 436F 01D3 62E8 E864 C9F3 4941 B2E8 C7F6 DFA6

Here are my profiles on other social networks:

Old Projects

Here are the links to some old projects and widgets that are still referenced available: