Shahin
Hasanov

It all began in Baku, in the settlement of Puta, at School No. 184. We grew up poor and a computer was out of the question, so I took my first steps in the digital world on a mobile phone.

Until 2007 I knew nothing about IT, but I was a solid electronics hobbyist. That gave me a strong technical foundation.

In 2006 I was drafted into the army. Service took me to the harsh Murovdag mountains, a place where character and endurance are truly forged.

Back from service, I stepped into a completely different reality. My childhood friend Anton Onufriev kept insisting that I buy a smartphone; they were only just appearing.

At first I did not dig into how it worked. I simply loved mobile games: .sis files and N-Gage titles that Anton set up after searching for information on forums.

Through that phone world I came across the thing that turned my life upside down: WAP chats. There was no wired internet in the settlement and I paid for mobile data with my last money, but I practically lived in those chats. I met people, argued, and was banned again and again.

One day it clicked: why should anyone get to ban me? How is this chat built inside? Why don’t I have one of my own yet?

Anton and I got excited about recreating a popular WAP site that everyone downloaded from. I designed the layout and picked at raw HTML right on the phone. Anton went further and worked out how to attach CSS styles.

When he showed me the finished site, exactly what we had been building together, I was stunned. Even after his explanation I did not understand how it worked.

Soon Anton decided it was all a dead end and quit programming, however much I tried to talk him out of it. People around us kept saying it was a waste of time. But I could no longer stop.

On one of the CMS platforms I built a full copy of Odnoklassniki, then wrote my own CMS and started making chats and news sites. Years of practice, trial and error, and hundreds of small projects shaped me as an engineer from the very dawn of Web 2.0, an experience no academy provides.

I founded SCW-GROUP, short for Secure Code Write. The concept logo, built around the idea of striving upward, was designed by Farhad Mammadov.

Years of work grew into serious, large-scale and profitable projects. Engineering grit combined with hard practice, and not code written without understanding how it works.