Ian Gabaraev.

I started diving like most people do — warm water, a kind instructor, a camera. I kept going because something about being suspended in blue felt like the closest thing to silence I had ever found.

Then I went deeper. Tech training, twin sets, deco bottles, planning gas for runtimes longer than my attention span. And somewhere in there the anxiety arrived — quietly at first, then with a kind of confidence.

This blog is a place to write honestly about that: the panic, the recovery, the boring drills that actually work, the gear that helps, and the dives that change how you think.

Day job: I am a lead full-stack engineer. React on the front, Python on the back, AWS and Azure underneath. For the past decade I have shipped production systems across healthcare, biotech, and education — cloud migrations, APIs, real-time UIs, distributed systems that have to hold up at scale. At Akvelon I lead development of an enterprise telehealth platform serving interpreters across 65 languages.

Outside the day job I build things for myself. NomadAtlas — a React 19 finance dashboard for digital nomads. Bat Sonar — an ultrasonic bat-detection rig that combines DSP with machine learning. Same instinct as the diving, honestly: go somewhere the room is quiet and see what the signal actually looks like.

If any of that sounds familiar — welcome. You are not the only one.