Senya Pugach

I am a creative developer who builds highly optimised award-winning products and experiences on the web. My works have won prestigious awards such as the iF Gold Design Award (the “design Oscar”), the Red Dot Design Award, and The Webby Awards. In addition, two U.S. patents were filled for my latest project.

I have a wide range of skills and experience in programming various technologies and platforms. Some of them are: 3D engines in browsers, websites in React, Vue.js and Angular (TypeScript or JavaScript), games in Unity and Godot, AR apps for iOS, stunning WebGL experiences, multiplayer games in JavaScript, automation tools, generative designs, voice-controlled games, brain-computer interfaces, Windows Phone apps, chatbots, raytracing and raycasting engines and node.js services.

Although I love design, I am also passionate about research, science, and experimentation. I love taking a vague outline of a solution and transforming it into a production-ready product.

Moscow, Russia

CV email telegram github linkedin instagram

Employments

Awards

2 pending U.S. patents
iF Gold Design Award
Red Dot Design Award
iF Design Award
Webby Awards
FWA
Awwwards (2x)
CSS Design Awards
Runet Rating (5x)
Golden Site Award (3x)
Silver Archer
Tagline Awards (4x)
Event of the Year 2020
Red Apple
ADCR Award

Skills

all, JavaScript, TypeScript, WebGL, React, Vue.js, node.js, Unity, Godot, AR, games, mobile apps

Projects

Krono: 3D engine & editor

I designed and developed a batteries-included 3D engine that is used to make mesmerising audio-visual web experiences. It has brought down our development time for 3D websites from one year to couple months.

Krono comes with built-in support for editing visual effects and audio, doing post-processing, and working with modern model / texture formats and their compressors / decoders / optimisers. The developer experience is very streamlined, with only 10 lines being required to display a model for the browser. Crucially, it can also be used by non-technical designers through a web-based editor that allows for adjusting the visual appearance of the render without touching the code.

Aquarium

I developed an immersive site for Aquarium, legendary founders of the Russian Rock stage. As viewers scroll through the site, they are transported through a human created and randomly generated experience that showcase’s Aquarium’s rich history and musical collection.

While developing this narrative, I had to learn 3D rendering at the advanced level. I wrote shaders, built an extensible 3D rendering architecture (which would become Krono), created tools for designers working on the same project, and constantly solved interesting, complex problems.

iF Gold Design Award, Webby Awards,
Awwwards — Mobile Excellence, Honors,
FWA, CSS Design Awards, Runet Rating, Art Directors Club of Russia Award,
Golden Site, Red Apple

Vimeo Venues

Vimeo Venues is a live events platform for more interactive events with a higher return.

I was the team leader of a three-person WebGL team and the leading 3D developer; architect and developed a complex WebGL UI from scratch; optimized the React and WebGL parts of the app, achieving 60 FPS in all browsers and devices; developed the Reactions — disappearing GIFs used by a huge audience to react to an event in the broadcast.

In a year and a half at the company, I created an innovative live experience product that filled 2 U.S. patent applications.

Guga

Guga is a sandbox browser multiplayer game where you play as memes. Inspired by VRChat, Roblox and Garry’s Mod, it works in a browser and is completely open for mod makers and community server hosting.

In this game, I am developing everything: game design, network programming & protocol, client-side prediction, lag compensation, rendering, authentication APIs, backend server, physics and so on. I also got crucial experience in building and growing a game community.

History of the Russian flag website

The Russian flag has changed dozens of time. At one point, its role was even played by a stick with a horse’s tail tied to it. The rich history of one of the main symbols of the country is presented on a website made in the form of a time spiral. Moving through it allows you to see in just a few minutes how the flag has changed and what it looked like at different times.

Thanks to Krono, the site was created in a month, which is an unbelievable time for a site of this complexity.

Tagline Awards — Best educational website, Best interactive solution / animation, Perfect craft

Immersion into Rukami

A registration page for the children's festival “Rukami”. An unusual and vivid immersion into the world of the festival.

Thanks to the use of Krono, project creation time was reduced from one year to three months, because of this the profitability of this project for the company was much higher than usual.

iF Design Award, Red Dot Design Award,
Runet Rating, Silver Archer, Golden Site, Event of the Year 2020

Sozvezdie website

Sozvezdie is a range of digital radios for civilian communication. The functionality and reliability of the devices are demonstrated on a spectacular website.

The advantages of the radios are presented with powerful interactive visualizations powered by the Krono engine.

Runet Rating — Industry and Equipment, Promo, Tagline Awards

Sotbi AR iOS app

An iOS augmented reality app demonstrates the oddity of corporate workdays.

Sotbi's are guys who, forcing debtors to pay back multibillion-rubles debts. So, in this AR game your goal is find the five hiding debtors.

download

Moscow Metro Map 4.0

For the Moscow metro map I created various tools to facilitate the designer's work on the map, and also developed scripts to automate the creation of the map in different formats and its translation into different languages. My work greatly reduced the time it took to create the map and saved the company money.

Sotbi app announcement

For Sotbi's AR announcement, I pulled the model out of Unity, wrote a web editor to draw the camera's flight path (on the next project, I learned that it turns out to be easier to do in the 3d editor) and patch FBXLoader from three.js using pako.js instead of zlib.js because the model was too slow to unpack on budget Androids.

Moscow International Medical Cluster website

MIMC is an unprecedented international medical project in Russia. I was the lead developer of it's site: I guided and organized the other developers, developed the main visual element of the project's identity — a mesmerizingly lively spot, made an editor for quick spot customization, and made a terrific 3D.

Golden Site, Runet Rating

DEATH³: raytraced shooter that fits in 7kb

I wrote a simple shooter with realtime raytracing that fits in only 7 kilobytes during js13kGames contest. Everything fits in this 7 kb: code, graphics and audio.

sources

Crybaby

use your knife to kill those who never cry

I made a raycasting engine from scratch during summer 2019 and wrote this game using it during one of the Ludum Dare weekends.

sources

BasisTextureLoader in three.js: support repeated loading of same texture

On Friday, the first day after the release of the Aquarium, I encountered a lack of video memory on many devices and the page crashes. I had three days before site will be promoted to the large audience to somehow solve this problem. It took me one weekend to learn about the existence of GPU compressed textures, learn about Basis Universal textures and write a patch for the BasisTextureLoader in three.js, as well as to finish the GLTF model loader so that he could understand .basis textures.

Time to harvest regrets

There is time to live and time to regret about ended live. In the end, we all must harvest our regrets about life to understand, was it worth it to wait the end that long? Game was made in 3 days on Ludum Dare #52.

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Keyvisual generator for CSKA ice hockey club

The pattern generator generously creates an almost infinite amount of camouflage. Patterns are generated as confidently and deftly, just like pucks that fly into the goals of CSKA’s opponents.

The generator is WebGL-based, with a camouflage algorithm implemented as a shader, has a lot of design options and exports both PNG and SVG images (which in WebGL was quite challenging).

try it out

2D editor for creating fast web animations

Scroll down and type “upisfree” for the editor. Entities dragging, cloning and scaling.

sources

Education renderer from the scratch

Educational renderer from the scratch to understand how renderers actually works.

$500 brain-computer interface: letters typing only with thoughts

In high school, I became interested in how the human brain works and in two weeks I built a brain-computer interface that allowed me to type letters using my brain signals only.
I used OpenBCI as EEG and P300 speller from OpenViBE. I patched OpenViBE drivers to make it compatible with OpenBCI, train P300 speller on my brain, translate speller to Russian, printed a plastic helmet in another city, made the power supply from old Nokia, fused up everything, and after that I typed my first words using brain only.
Also, experimenting, I was one of the first in the world who combined VR and BCI into one product.

Memories

childhood memories from 1937

The Great Terror has affected every family in Soviet Union: my great-grandfather was shot, great-great-grandmother was imprisoned and others were dispossessed.

sources

“My Way” Windows Phone app

A Windows Phone application that allows residents of Omsk (this is in Siberia) to find out when a bus will arrive at their stop. It is especially useful in winter to avoid freezing to death at the bus stop. 10 000 downloads. Also, there is AR in this app, in 2014.

download sources

wish you were here

a game about a man who gave everything to God to have his love with him

My girlfriend got stuck in another country during the COVID-19 pandemic and I really missed her.

sources

Emoji translator

Test task to Art. Lebedev Studio. Translate from 8 languages to emojies. Very fast, multithreading, English & Russian stemming, emoji variants for the word, working in non-supporting emoji environments (like Windows XP), custom speedy data format.

sources

...

a game about Kazakhstan's attack on Omsk

First Unity experience.

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coub.com terminal player

Watch coubs (it's like gifs, but with sound) in your terminal.

artlebedev.ru/dj

Art. Lebedev's own mini Soundcloud. I patched hls.js, setup nginx and wrote audio converting scripts and instructions how to use it without me.

medik: Windows Store CLI

Test task for a internship in LoyaltyPlant. I was invited there because of my winning at one of the main school scientific conferences in Russia. At 2016 there were no CLI for Windows Store but “LoyaltyPlant” had thousands of apps which they needed to update.

Three commercial medical Telegram bots

Three Telegram bots for doctors in Moscow Oblast to automate some aspects of their work and for getting rid of paper routine. Commercial project.

HeavyCraft: Minecraft server that I had at 14 y.o.

I had a Minecraft server called “HeavyCraft” in 2013 when I was 14 y.o. It had a site with shop where you could buy blocks and items for real money, custom launcher & mods build, guns, cars and even planes. I wanted to create a first person shooter plus Minecraft. And this is was first Minecraft server in the world which had a Russian Ruble sign in game (because I redraw $ to ₽ and Ruble doesn't had official sign in that times).