I build systems from knowledge.
I’m Vitaly Khoruzhko — an engineer, entrepreneur, and product builder. I’ve spent more than 20 years working with software, data, and business systems. Today, I explore AI and knowledge systems, while in my spare time I’m building my own family tree, which has long since grown into a research project of its own.
I’ve always been curious about how things fit together.
My career started with code. In 2001, I began working as a software developer. I was fascinated by the idea that a few lines of code could turn an abstract idea into something real: a system, a tool, a product. More than twenty years later, I still feel the same way. But somewhere along the way, I realised that writing code was only one part of what I really enjoyed. I became interested in the systems behind the software: how businesses work, how people make decisions, how information moves through an organisation, where complexity comes from, and how technology can make that complexity easier to understand. That took me from software development into business analysis, information systems, BI, product development and eventually entrepreneurship.
Building things that last
I have always preferred building something of my own to simply working on someone else’s roadmap. One of the results of that approach is a TMS platform for logistics and forwarding companies that I have been developing for many years. It started as software. Then it became a product. Then a business. And eventually it became a kind of laboratory where I learned about architecture, product strategy, automation, integrations, analytics, customers, pricing, business models and all the messy things that happen between an idea and a real product. I still write code. I still design systems. I still enjoy opening an empty project and figuring out how to make something work. But these days I am less interested in technology for technology’s sake. I care about useful systems.
Following the data
My academic background is in artificial intelligence and geographic information systems. Perhaps that explains some of my obsessions. I like maps. I like graphs. I like databases. I like patterns. I like taking something chaotic and trying to find the structure hidden inside. Today my curiosity naturally leads me toward AI, LLMs, knowledge systems, automation and new ways of working with information. I am particularly interested in what happens when AI is combined with structured data, domain knowledge and systems designed around real human workflows. The technology changes incredibly quickly. The question that interests me remains surprisingly stable: How can we turn knowledge into something useful?
Then I discovered that genealogy was a systems problem too
For more than 15 years, I have been researching my own family history. At first it was simply curiosity. Who were my ancestors? Where did they live? What happened to them? What did their world look like? Then the rabbit hole opened. Archives. Church records. Census lists. Land documents. Old maps. Surnames. Places that disappeared from modern maps. Different spellings of the same name. Thousands of people connected by dozens of family lines. And eventually DNA. The deeper I went, the more familiar the problem became. Genealogy is essentially a massive, messy information system. The data is fragmented across archives, databases, maps, documents, family stories and DNA matches. The challenge is not simply finding another document. The challenge is connecting the pieces and understanding what they mean together. That is exactly the kind of problem I have always enjoyed solving. So genealogy stopped being just a hobby. It became another way to apply the same mindset.
Different projects. Same obsession.
Software. AI. Data. Maps. Business. Genealogy. On paper, they don’t seem to belong together. In my head, they do. I am interested in complex systems and the hidden connections inside them. I like taking scattered pieces of information and turning them into a picture. I like building things rather than just talking about them. And I like projects where there is still something unknown to discover. That is probably why I have never been very good at having just one professional identity. I am an engineer. An entrepreneur. A product builder. A researcher. And, increasingly, a collector and organiser of knowledge.
What I’m building now
Today my work spans several directions. I continue developing software products and exploring AI-powered systems. I experiment with new ways of organising and using knowledge. And through Heritavia, I help people reconstruct their family histories using archival research, historical sources, maps and genetic genealogy. These projects may eventually evolve into something very different from what they are today. That’s part of the fun. I don’t have a perfectly defined 10-year plan. I have a direction.
Build useful things. Follow interesting questions. Connect the dots. And keep learning.
Knowledge → systems → discovery.
Products stay on separate surfaces: Domino on alfakit.by, Ops/data/AI on semperinmotu.com, family history on heritavia.vitalykhoruzhko.com.
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