Hello World! Thanks for coming to my website. If you’re looking for professional side of what I do, check out the “Professional” Section. If you’re here to get to know my personality a bit more, check out “Personal” Section:

Professional (in third person’s voice):

Maks is a design-savvy full stack engineer turned design technologist who excels at working within multidisciplinary teams. The work that Maks especially enjoys involves concept development, prototyping (digital and/or physical), user research, and making tools for generative art (check out #plottertwitter). Maks is an inventor and an artist.

Currently Maks is working as UX Design Technologist at Amazon‘s Device Design Group in Seattle.

Currently Maks is a Senior Full Stack Web Developer at Firstech LLC, the connected car company in Kent, WA.

Currently Maks is attending a 15-month long Master of Science in Technology Innovation program at the University of Washington.

Currently Maks works at NBC News as Web Developer/ UX engineer.

You can get a sense of Maks’ work on his LinkedIn .

When it comes to delivering high-quality results, Maks is/has:

  • Motivated, entrepreneurial-minded and focused on user experience
  • Excellent leadership and communication skills
  • Ability to build, foster and manage relationships within multidisciplinary teams
  • Well-versed in creative process, generating design concepts, prototyping and evaluating designs
  • Deep knowledge of hardware prototyping platforms, tools and development processes
  • Significant experience with laser cutting, 3D printing, PCB design and soldering
  • Significant expertise in Web Technologies: responsive design, backend and frontend, web
  • performance and scaling, real-time communications
  • Comfortable with a variety of programming languages: Javascript, Python, PHP, C

Maks has managed full life cycles of dozens of projects from both, hardware-software and people-management perspective.

In 2017 Maks launched a line of modular LED displays on CrowdSupply called “Neosegment Digit“. He managed the hardware and software development, supply chain, QA, marketing and delivered all 500+ units to backers successfully.

While working at NBC News 2014-2017 as a Web Developer / UX Engineer, Maks has:

  • Developed performant front end software driving all video experiences for the NBC News shows like Dateline, Nightly News and Meet the Press for a variety of form factors
  • Produced code that substantially increased video experience engagement on the site
  • Created a unified codebase for video experiences across the site that reduced maintenance
  • Led backend and frontend development for live blogging features that boosted engagement
  • Handled communication across multiple teams and departments within the company
  • Participated in and won first prize in company hackathons

In 2012-2013 Maks has built over two dozen websites in his spare time, some of them you might have heard of:

  • Bootsnipp.com – community of over 100,000 users sharing code snippets ( sold )
  • Mymaplist.com website where you put pins on a map and can share the map ( sold )
  • Delaunay Triangle pattern generator – background image generator (active and has over 5,000 users monthly)
  • Laravel-tricks.com – community of Laravel developers helping each other (active and has over 10,000 users monthly)
  • Builtwithlaravel.com – collection of projects built with Laravel (sold)
  • MissingPetFlyer.com – simple webapp to create “missing pet flyer” (expired)
  • Filegr.am – file sharing website where files expire after about a day (sold)
  • BookPag.es – webapp to create landing pages for books (expired)
  • VintageMessage.com – webapp that generates vintage – looking posters (deactivated)
  • Laracasts.com – website to share screencasts about Laravel (domain sold to Jeffrey Way)
  • And many, many more.

In 2011-2013, Maks worked at Branding Personality, a marketing agency. While there Maks has:

  • Designed and developed content management systems using Laravel PHP framework
  • Developed dozens of responsive websites
  • Created internal systems for accelerating and automating development tasks

Maks wrote two books on various web development topics, one of them became a bestseller on Leanpub:

Personal:

I like telling stories, and I have a story to tell you about myself. Thank you in advance for your time!

To answer your questions “Who is this guy?” and “What does he do?”, I will start with an introduction and small bio :

My full name is Maksim Surguy (pronounced as “Mäkseem Suːrgʌaɪ˜˜”) but I go by “Maks”. I was born and raised in Ukraine. I moved to the USA in 2004 with my parents and my younger brother. While living in Ukraine I had a very fun childhood experimenting with electronics, chemistry and making small rockets that I attached to model cars and launched on a road by the apartments where we lived. My dad worked in construction and he taught me lots of building skills and always encouraged me to experiment and be independent. I got hooked on reading his technical magazines (think of “Wired” of his day) when I was 7. My mother is a wonderful woman that took great care of our home and could always come up with a delicious meal for her family (the way she made mashed potatoes is the best!). I love my family, my parents spent a lot of their time and money so that their kids could become independent and competent people.

When I moved to the USA, I went on to finish high school and then enrolled at Cal State University going for bachelors in Computer Science. I worked full time while studying at school half to full time for 6 years. I was able to pay for my undergraduate degree without taking any loans (I believe that God has always provided opportunities for me to make money). I’ve graduated from CSUF in the fall of 2011 with Bachelors in Computer Science. Simultaneously while studying full time, I have been working at a school district as a computer technician for many years.

You can connect with me on LinkedIn or follow me on Twitter.


Here is a short list of things I excelled at in childhood and teen years:

  • At 9 I cut out some magnesium from a MIG fighter jet that was put on as a kid’s playground and used that magnesium to make pyrotechnics experiments.
  • At 10 I won regional Math Olympics in Moscow without registering for it. I came over and took the challenge just because I wanted to see how hard it was. Next day I found out I was first place winner.
  • At 12  I replicated Levitron – a magnetic toy that hovers in the air defying gravity. I have never seen it in person. I only found a small video of the toy in action and thought I would be able to make one. Taking a big circular magnet from a huge speaker and a small circular magnetic top I was able to find the perfect balance of the weight of the top piece and entertained every guest who would come to our apartment. It was crazy fascinating (see a video of that toy in action, you’d be amazed too).
  • At 13 I built my own micro FM transmitter
  • At 14 I made my own LAN network using two wires, LPT port of a computer and an iron pipe that ran central heating system in the apartment complex. I played Duke Nukem 3D with my friend that lived many stories above mine.
  • At 15 I started breakdancing. Within 2 years I was the doing the best headspin that you could find in Ukraine. I beat the world record at the time but didn’t have it captured on camera. See my breakdancing video below: