Like I have mentioned here before, a few years back I was given the opportunity to work with an incredibly talented group of engineers in St. Petersburg, Russia. While this was at the end of the dot-com bubble and long after Mr. Gorbachev had torn down that wall, Russia still felt so strangely different than any place else I had lived or visited. Looking back however, it's always the people you met that keep the memory alive, even more so if one manages to stay in touch, may it be just via email or Y!-Messenger.

After Artificial-Life, the Boston, MA headquartered company had imploded, I returned from my adventure working in Russia and re-joined Cardiff Software (what became later Verity, Inc.). Two really smart guys (Kirill Kalishev, Sergey Zhulin) of the Russian team I had led, joined JetBrains, the Prague, Czech Republic based software company, which had just opened an office in St. Petersburg.