Production AI patterns
Streaming, fallbacks, function calling, predictable cost. The unglamorous half of AI that decides whether a feature ships.
( 00 / a world learner from Tashkent )
The Death of theWorld Champion.
I'm Ruslan Kan — half-Korean, half-Uzbek, fluent in neither and raised between both. This is how I stopped chasing crowns and started chasing conversations.
한국인KoreanOʻzbekUzbekРусскийRussianEnglishTashkentMoscowMinervaworld learnerthe circle, not the podium
It began with a lamppost.
Someone had taped an ad for mental-arithmetic classes to a lamppost in Tashkent. Out of acute wonder-boredom, I signed up — my Korean immigrant family needed no convincing beyond the word "arithmetic."
Five months later I was on a plane to Moscow for my first International Mental Arithmetic Olympiad.
Wonder-boredom. The best reason I have ever had.
The wall, and the circle that tore it down.
The Olympiad coincided with the World Cup. I told myself I had room for only one contest — and walled off everything else. An accident tore that wall down.
Near Red Square I stumbled into a celebration: Croatian fans toasting their team's impossible run — joined, of all people, by the Russians and the English they had just beaten. Rivals teasing each other over who admired Croatia more.
I drifted into the circle and started translating — English to Russian and back, even parsing a little Croatian slang. "To hell with the linguistics," someone laughed, and soon we were dancing like old friends.
Before we parted, the Russians pressed their plush mascot into my hands. Zabivaka. For the translation, they said. Looking back, an omen.
A relic of when competition brought people together, instead of keeping them apart.
Three hundred seconds.
The Olympiad itself lasted five minutes. In those 300 seconds we strained every nerve — vast sets of numbers, accuracy to the decimal. I won.
"World Champion" arrived with a near-guaranteed full ride to Moscow State University. That night I thought I saw my path with perfect certainty.
Then came the others: Central Asia, Beijing, Thailand, the American Mathematics Olympiad. Hundreds of problems solved in milliseconds; number theory, combinatorics, probability. The cups piled up.
300seconds on the clock
World Champion- 2018moscow · world champion
- 2019central asia
- 2019beijing
- 2022usa · amo
- 2025thailand
Then the world changed.
First COVID. Then the war in Ukraine. Then a New Cold War.
Questions surfaced. Did I want to be "the World Champion" behind an Iron Curtain 2.0? Can anyone be the world champion in a deglobalizing, multipolar world — or only ever a world champion of their own shard of it?
Are the article and the capital letter even the point?
The best podium is a circle.
Championship was never about domination. It was about dialogue.
The point was never to stand above the world. It is to stand within one — to translate, to connect, to keep learning with people whose flags and alphabets differ from mine, but whose laughter syncs to my beat.
I still love the race of ideas, the click of a solved proof, the breathless five minutes where everything sharpens. But I no longer chase crowns. I chase conversations.
No longer the World Champion. A world learner.
the best podium is a circle
Three areas I keep returning to.
I still solve things — for other people now. Lead developer and co-founder at Bloomin (formerly Saman AI Academy); production AI, shipped before university.
01 / pillar
02 / pillar
Internal tools
Admin copilots, ops automations, scrapers, agents on a cron. Built fast for one user. The fastest way to learn a new technique.
03 / pillar
AI-first MVPs
Full-stack: Next.js, Supabase, an LLM, billing, auth. End-to-end systems that hold up in production, not POCs.
Production AI · shipped
Four builds. Shipped, written up, in production.
2025TrainHireProduction
Naviq (TrainHire)
Anthropic-powered 80-lesson academy generator. B2B SaaS, RU/EN, three portals. MVP shipped fast: 56 tests green.
Read case2025samanTAEdTech
samanTA
GPT-4o tutor and quiz engine with a Telegram bot front-end. Live tutor flow used by students daily.
Read case2025PersonalMarkets
Polymarket Tracker
Cron-driven scraper plus paper-trader signal layer over the top-50 BTC 5-minute bets. Production cron, hands-off.
Read case2026KenmoreClient work
Kenmore Appliance Support
Freelance WordPress build, 116+ pages, custom plugin, full design system. Live with full handover.
Read caseDrag · scroll · arrow-keys
Off the board.
I play midfield. I shoot on a digicam. I make astrophysics content on the side. And I translate — between languages, and between people. Russian and English, fluent in both.
Tashkent to Minerva. Then four cities in four years.
- 2024itstep · teaching
- 2025naviq · shipped
- 2025samanTA · shipped
- 2025council · president
- 2026.febpolymarket
- 2026.aprkenmore · client
- 2026.mayminerva · admit
- minerva · class of 2030
- 2026.augsan francisco
- 2027tokyo
- 2028buenos aires
- 2029berlin
- 2030graduate
Here I am — carrying a plush, looking for the next circle.
If your flag or your alphabet differs from mine, even better. Let us talk.
the best podium is a circle
kan.nadya1978@gmail.comTashkent, Uzbekistan · GMT+5. Heading to Minerva in August — class of 2030, then four cities in four years.