September 13

13 September is Programmer's Day. I was born on 13 September 2005.

I treated this as an amusing coincidence for a long time. Looking back, I don't believe that anymore. No one in my family wrote code before me — no engineering dynasty, no parental dream that the son would become a programmer. Not one external reason to choose this profession. And yet the choice happened — at an age when you choose cartoons, not a specialism.

Now I think it wasn't a choice. It was a signature placed on my birth certificate — one that simply went unread for a long time, by me included. A calling doesn't always arrive as a loud epiphany at seventeen. Sometimes it arrives as a date that will later coincide with the day of your profession. And it waits, patiently, until you grow up enough to understand what it means.

The tiredness that makes you want more

I'm twenty. In September I'll be twenty-one. I've been writing code seriously since about fifteen — five years if you only count what reached the user. Today I'm Head of IT at Bolalar Production: three engineers on the team, three products live, and we support Alla — a large media platform for kids.

I get tired every day. There's nothing surprising about that — ask anyone who spends twelve hours at a desk. What's surprising is the other side: I like this tiredness.

The end of a day in which I built something, fixed something or made something a little better — that's the end of a day after which I want to eat, sleep, and the next morning sit back down at the keyboard. I can't imagine a day without code. And, honestly, I don't try to.

I know that sounds slightly banal. But I haven't found another honest way to say it. This is my favourite work. Full stop.

Why kids

When people ask the broader question — not 'what do you do' but 'why' — the answer turns out not to be about code.

At Bolalar Production we build products for kids. Sites, platforms, content, mobile apps — the things that eventually end up in a schoolchild's or a teenager's hands. Technically these are interesting problems — they really are. But that isn't what keeps me here.

What keeps me here is that I can no longer pretend the problem of children's screens is solved by lecturing them.

Look at any child in Uzbekistan — any city, any family. They have a phone or a tablet in their hands. The question is no longer 'should we allow this'; the question is 'what are they actually looking at'. You can tell them 'no' as many times as you like — children aren't going back to board games just because we wish they would. That ship has sailed. Fighting it is a pastime for people who are either very tired or refuse to look at reality.

So what do we do?

We build the things they'll open anyway. We occupy the place their attention goes — but with something useful. Games that teach them to think, instead of filling the gap. Platforms where a child isn't 'killing time' but making something that will stick with them a week later. Content that leaves the head working slightly better, not slightly worse.

This isn't an ideological position. It's a practical one. If you're building a screen a child will stick to for an hour, be kind enough to make that hour teach them something.

A small bet

I don't believe the phrases about 'changing a generation'. That's too big a bet for a three-person team in Tashkent, and too big a promise to live by.

I believe in the small bet.

If, across the whole arc of my work, one single child in our sunny country opens something we made — and their day becomes slightly more meaningful. If, instead of an hour they would have spent aimlessly scrolling a feed, they spent that hour with something that taught them something. If they learned something new — about the world, about language, about logic, about themselves. If they became slightly more attentive, slightly more patient, slightly more curious than they were that morning. If their picture of the world expanded by even one degree.

One child. Not 'a million users', not 'captured the market'. One — real, somewhere in the Fergana valley, or in Chilonzor, or in a small village beyond Samarkand — who grew up slightly more developed, slightly more thoughtful, slightly more substantial as a person, because at some moment our product landed on their screen instead of one more empty story. That's enough for me.

I'll never know for certain. It won't show up in our analytics. No one will send a message saying 'you changed my life'. And that's fine. I do this work not for the confirmation, but because I think it's right.

13 September

In September I'll turn twenty-one. Programmer's Day, as always, falls on the same day.

I'll pick my present myself. It will be one more product we put into production on exactly that date. It's almost always the case with me: on 13 September I ship something new. It's my little personal tradition, and the team knows by now and doesn't try to talk me out of it.

If you also work in IT and you're reading this — I wish you that strange tiredness, the kind that makes you want more. And if you build products for kids — protect that work. It's not the loudest. It's not the highest-paid. But out of all the things we can do with this army of computers, it's probably one of the most useful.

Children are our future. That isn't a slogan. It's a statement of fact.