By Vlad Poposky
DESIGN LUNATIC Sasha Smirnov spent countless hours in front of his computer coding. The front page of his website is simple, it’s very clean, polished. His website took him a month to make and perfect. His computer is all he needs to work, and all it takes for him is a few lines of code to create something amazing. He does not give up, he keeps going. A simple error is not a barrier for Sasha, he will get it done. He is just a 14 year old in Los Altos, who since 7th grade has been the Design Lunatic, a Web Design HTML genius.
We see website pages everyday, everytime we visit the internet, they are mostly made by people with many degrees in computer science and many years of studying C++, HTML, Java, etc. Sasha is a sophomore who goes to the same High School as me, Los Altos. He is probably one of the youngest people in the world to perfect HTML and web design at such a young age. Sasha works alone, ever since his brother graduated last year and got accepted to Berkeley University and moved. Sasha gets emails asking people to make them websites and help them maintain theirs. Google was interested into giving Sasha a full time job, but he couldn’t take the job because of his young age. Major companies look at Sasha’s work and they are blown away by it, especially after finding out Sasha is only a 14 year old in Los Altos, a normal highschool student, with extraordinary talents. “People call me and email me asking me to make Websites for them, they want me, not some person with a thousand degrees in programing and computer science” (Sasha 2012). Sasha has shown to be one of the best Web Designers around Silicon Valley. It’s amazing, but how did he get here?
“I Started Web Design in 7th grade, we had a human disease project and we had to create a presentation and I wanted to make a website...” Sasha had a passion for websites even before he knew how to make the. “...My brother Vania, taught me the basics of HTML and all that good stuff and I made a website, since that I’ve been really interested in Web Design and I’ve been making websites”. (Sasha 2012)
Sashas Website, http://www.designlunatic.com/.
Vania is Sasha older brother and had influenced Sasha in a lot of ways. Sasha is taking the same path as Vania in high school, takig middle college. About a months or two ago, Sasha got a job offer from Google, a full time job for Sasha. He wanted to accept it, he called the person at google who has found him and explain that he is a student and that he is 14, and that he would really like to do the job but he can’t. Instead they offered him an internship and said that after he finishes his education he could come work at Google. Sasha was blown away, everyone was.Sasha knew what he wanted to do for the rest of his life and the only thing he has to go through is school. In school Sasha goes for a 4.0, he’s got amazing grades and he doesn’t even have to try that hard. School is boring for him, he wants to do middle college next year hoping it will help him increase his skills even more. Middle College is a program where students can go to a community college as high school students. It would really help Sasha improve his skills, it helped his older brother. In the future Sasha wants to get his degrees and work for google, but until then he remains working for small time companies and doing small jobs here and there.