I never fitted neatly
into one professional box.
Developer, analyst, architect, Head of IT, entrepreneur — all of those labels have been true at different points. None of them describes the whole path particularly well.
I am interested in systems in the broad sense: code, processes, teams, organizations, and the rules that make all of them interact.
I entered IT in a very literal way
In 2008 I went through internal training at Domodedovo Airport and started as a junior Lotus Notes developer. These were corporate systems without startup glamour: documents, approval routes, support, and employees who had to open the software in the morning and get their work done.
That environment is good at curing the idea that software exists on its own. If a person cannot understand the interface, if the real process differs from the diagram, or if nobody knows who owns a problem after release, the system does not work — even when the code is technically correct.
I became increasingly interested in everything around the code
At a bank I was no longer only developing. Department leaders and I reconstructed the actual document flow: who passes what to whom, where delays appear, how registration works, where a document lives, and who is responsible for it. That work became an internal system built from scratch, including integration with 1C.
The same pattern later repeated at a much larger scale. At the Directorate of Cultural Centers of Moscow I worked on an industry information platform used across a network of more than one hundred institutions. Sometimes the engineering problem looked like a wrong field in a database. Sometimes it looked like three departments using the same word for three different things. Both had to be solved.
At some point the responsibility became explicitly managerial
I helped build the IT function of a new organization and later became Head of IT at ZIL Cultural Center. There was no useful boundary between “technical” and “organizational”: team, vendors, procurement, security, HelpDesk, Active Directory, hardware, procedures, management, and users were one system.
The pandemic made that especially visible. More than one hundred employees had to move to remote work quickly without stopping the organization. That is the part of management I enjoy: not performing leadership above technical work, but making it possible for people and infrastructure to work together.
My education was not a straight line either
Before IT I had a foundation in accounting and finance. I later studied applied informatics in economics, completed a bachelor’s degree in management, and separately completed professional retraining in IT. In retrospect the mix looks more coherent than it felt at the time: I have always been drawn to the point where a technical decision meets economics, management, and human behavior.
Belgrade reset a lot — usefully
I moved to Serbia in 2022. Along with the move, the familiar context of large organizations, formal titles, and institutional authority disappeared. I started building hands-on again: small apps, local business automation, ERP systems, client portals, integrations, backend work, and AI experiments.
That became an independent practice and later NeedleBit. The tools are very different now — Supabase instead of Lotus Domino, n8n replacing parts of old integration work, AI agents working alongside developers — but my operating pattern barely changed: understand the real process first, define the system boundaries, then watch what happens when real users touch the result.
And a very different life has always run alongside work
I have danced hustle / discofox for years and occasionally teach. I play guitar, keyboards, and accordion, and I sing. I have organized concerts, festivals, and city events ranging from small gatherings to projects with thousands of participants. I care about photography, design, cinema, and travel.
I am also interested in psychology and philosophy — not as another professional keyword, but because people are usually more complicated than the processes we draw for them. For someone who has spent a career building systems, that is a useful thing to remember.
Now
I live in Belgrade and work at the intersection of technology leadership, systems architecture, and product delivery. I am most useful where there is real complexity: several groups of people, old constraints, unclear ownership, and a need to carry a solution into operation rather than stop at a polished release.
If you only need the technology list, it is in my public CV repository. I want this site to hold the part of the story a list of tools cannot show.
Identity note
I have an exact namesake: Mortimer, associated with the Russian project “Conscious Mercantilism.” He is a different person. I am Antiokh, Anton Vladislavovich Nazarov in Belgrade; my main public identifiers are the GitHub account Antiokh and LinkedIn profile nazarovanton.