The NMT - the national exam that decides whether you get into university - still happens every year, even though school is anything but normal. 25% of Ukrainian students study online-only; 20% of classes get cancelled by bombings; in the east, more than half don't happen at all. If your family can't afford a tutor, you can end up basically on your own.

Klepka comes from the same place as Kudyvstupaty: Ukrainian students needing help right now and not getting enough of it. So Anton Tsypko and I are building a free AI tutoring platform for NMT prep. It is already helping 1,500+ students.

I led Cambridge's largest hackathon.

Most hackathons felt corporate and boring, basically recruitment events with merch. I wanted to create something different, a weekend which students would spend building insane projects.

So together with James we ran CamHack 2025. We ran a slightly insane advertising campaign (including hiding 650 small rubber ducks around the university) and grew it from ~100 to 250+ participants.

30 hours of building genuinely unhinged projects under the theme "Unintended Behaviour". And it worked!!! The projects were weird, technically strong, and people actually cared.

‹ ›

I started Kudyvstupaty because Ukrainian students applying abroad usually have zero real information. University websites are in different languages, every country has its own weird rules, and no one at school knows how any of it actually works.

When I was 15, I had to cold-message friends of friends of friends just to understand basic things. Later, when I had easy access to people studying at top universities, I collected 85+ honest real acceptance stories and put everything in one place. It took a few days to build and a lot of annoying my friends, but it became exactly the resource I wish I had.

So far, it's helped 3,300+ Ukrainian students navigate applying abroad during a critical moment for Ukrainian education.

I led this with James and an amazing team - 48 hours to build any game you can dream of: video games, board games, ARGs. The theme was "Set In Stone" and people went absolutely wild with it. Hid ~1000 rubber ducks around Cambridge as marketing, which turns out is surprisingly effective - we ended up getting people from all kinds of fields, not just CS.

47 games were submitted. Someone built a mobster interrogation game where you're accused of killing your brother and have to shift the blame before your feet get set in concrete. Someone made a gaze-controlled snake game designed for people with cerebral palsy. Someone wrote an entire game in Verilog and ran it on an FPGA. There was a Medusa puzzle game, a mahjong tower defence, a kidney stone that travels back in time, and a board game based on Irish mythology.

I secured sponsorship from Jane Street, Citadel Securities, Optiver, Anthropic, and others.

‹ ›

Cambridge felt weirdly uncreative - everyone wrapped in deadlines, no space to just build something for fun. I couldn't find people who'd spend evenings making stuff just because.

So I started QUACK with James. It's a weekly, no-pressure build night where people just show up and work on whatever they're excited about.

~100 members total, around 30 show up weekly to work on AI tools, quantum projects, graphics engines, hardware builds, whatever catches their interest.

I secured sponsorship from HRT, Citadel Securities, Optiver and EF for hardware to allow students to build whatever they want.

‹ ›

I created my own language learning app for my friends to learn Ukrainian. I learnt German myself from scratch to B2 (upper intermediate) without any courses or classes - just a mix of different apps/websites/approaches.

I did not like any app, but I liked parts of many (at some point I had 24 apps installed on my phone - I wanted to experiment to find what worked for me).

So I built one place that combines spaced repetition (Anki-style), a chatbot to actually use the language, small games, and structured lessons - all sharing the same vocabulary, so you're not relearning the same words in five different apps.