Its almost unbelievable that a person speaking literary Ukrainian, Russian and English, using complicated programming terms to speak about his life passion, coding, is just 14 years old. But it is true. Ilya Kovalevskyi is an 8th grade student at Kyiv's “Intelligence” lyceum and one of 20 winners of the annual world programming contest Google Code-In 2012.
“Over the last three years there have been a total of nine students from
Eastern Europe,” says Stephanie Taylor, a Google Code-In program administrator.
But Kovalevskyi will be the first Ukrainian to win the software development
contest for pre-university students aged 13 to 17. As a reward, he will travel
to California to spend several days at Google headquarters.
“In the contest statistics they referred to Ukraine as ‘other
countries’,” Kovalevskyi said in a comment on Ukraine’s typically low profile at
such events. Nonetheless, Taylor ensures there were four more competitors from
Ukraine in 2010, 2011 and 2012.
The boy seems to be proud of his feat, but claims to have had more
modest ambitions. “I just wanted a T-shirt they give to every participant who
completes the minimum of three tasks and that’s it,” Kovalevskyi says. “And I
completed 63 tasks on user interface development, finding bugs in existing
programs, appending programs and so on.”
Kovalevskiy was born in Kyiv and says he was already able to hide
folders from his parents when he was 4, but has seriously gone into coding
around two years ago. Now Kovalevskyi ensures that he is able to support
himself and is enrolled in several freelance projects.
His talents have now gained him recognition at school, though the
computer whiz still likes his privacy. “Now everyone congratulates me and
there is even a wallpaper devoted to my victory in Google Code-In 2012 in
school lobby,” Kovalevskyi says, though his computer science teacher Nataliya
Breus adds that he continues to enjoy his space.
“He says that sitting alone is a more convenient way for him to study,”
she said. “He lives in his own little world of programming, computer graphics
and all the stuff he loves and I am pretty sure that he is comfortable there,”
she said.
Breus says Kovalevskyi is special, but not all the teachers are happy
with him. “The biology and history teachers say he is lazy and doesn’t do
anything and basically they are right – he learns just what he wants to,” Breus
says. “For example he likes English, math and physics, what we have about
computer science – I should confess, I am not able to teach him anything he
doesn’t know yet,” the teacher said.
However Kovalevskyi doesn’t think he is a wunderkind, as many call him
now. “I do spend some nights at my computer, but I also do play football and
believe that I am pretty good in it,” Kovalevskyi laughs. “I am just an
ordinary Kyiv boy and that’s it,” he smiles his adult smile, that says just the
opposite.
Kyiv Post staff writer Daryna Shevchenko can be
reached at [email protected]
