Nursultan Yerezhepov

He’s just turned26 and he is from Astana. Thegraduate (Bachelor and Master) of Kazakh-British Technical University won the contest of Shakhmardan Yessenov Foundation in 2016. Nursultan spent half a year in Silicon Valley, where he gained tremendous experience at astartup called 11SIGHT.

He codes in Java, Ruby, C#, C++, javascript, so understandably his portfolio is filled with so many hackathons and bootcamps, as well as the Grand Prizeof the International student competition on Information Technology projects and participationin the semi-finals of the World Programming Championship in Tashkent. Upon Nursultan’s return from Silicon Valley to Kazakhstan, we asked himto answer a few questions.

1. What have you been doing during the internship?
11SIGHT is a startup I have worked for. It is an online platform for suppliers of goods and services. It allows businesses and their customers to communicate with each other instantly. This enhances the speed of the service, and improves its quality. We now have over a dozen clients in Sillicon Valley. They pay a monthly subscription for this product, offering their ideas on how to improve our app even more, which is excellent for both sides. What have I personally been doing? I have been testing and developing the administrative part (reports, filters, configuration data of the project), as well as working on a chat server. Moreover, I was responsible for adding new features such as a welcome video, call forwarding and others.

2. What results have you achieved, Nursultan?
For me it was the first experience abroad. I was able to witness how consumer and work culture in the States differs from ours. From the very first day there I noticed and loved that creative IT-atmosphere everywhere; it’s hard to explain but I just felt it. Imagine you are going to work onpublic transport, and you can see IT guys who arealready working on their laptops right there on the bus. It was interesting to observe how they were coding. In just 6 months I was able to learn a new programming language (Ruby) and technologies (WebRTC, SIP). They are key to our startup, as when using them, we can support both voice and video communication on our platform. I also started to learn programming on mobile devices supporting Android OS. Having worked for half a year there, I realized that in a startup every employee must be ready to participate even in non-core activities.

3. How do you plan on applying the acquired experience?
Even now, having returned to Astana, I keep on working with 11SIGHT remotely. At the end of the internship they offered me to stay and continue cooperation. I happily accepted their offer. We’re in constant communication, with me working from Astana, holding daily conference calls, discussing tasks for the day and issues. I feel that I keep developing every day and the desire to implement what I plan becomes stronger day by day. What do I want? To develop a product that will improve people’s lives in our century. That’s just an idea that has not yet been formed precisely, but it will be something to do with mobile applications. I think they are the future.